What’s Next For UVM?


The infrastructure for much of the chip verification being done today is looking dated and limited in scope. Design has migrated to new methodologies, standards and tools that are being introduced to deal with heterogeneous integration, more customization, and increased complexity. Verification methodologies started appearing soon after the release of SystemVerilog. Initially they were inten... » read more

No More Easy IP Money


The semiconductor intellectual property ([getkc id="43" kc_name="IP"]) industry is two decades old, but questions are still being asked about what's wrong with it and what needs to be fixed. Normally these kinds of issues are reserved for fast-moving, young industries, not one that is the backbone of semiconductors. Design reuse has become an indispensable part of the design of nearly all el... » read more

Balancing Emulation And FPGA-Based Prototyping For Software Development


This year’s Design Automation Conference (DAC) has just finished and confirmed some of the trends I discussed in my last blog, “The Top Five Trends in Verification to Watch For at DAC 2016”, specifically when it comes to the set of connected engines, or “COVE” as Jim Hogan dubbed it. The Cadence Theater at DAC is always a good opportunity to listen to hands-on customer experiences, an... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools & IP Synopsys uncorked PHY and Controller IP for PCI Express 4.0 architecture, which the company says reduces latency by up to 20% and area by 15% compared to the previous implementation. The IP supports lane margining to assess performance variation tolerance. PLDA announced a PCIe 4.0 development platform, and provides a PCIe 3.0-x8 (upstream) to PCIe 4.0-x4 (downstream) Integ... » read more

Why IP Subsystems And Why Now?


At the recently concluded DAC 2016 conference in Austin, Texas, I had the opportunity to participate in a tutorial on IP Subsystems on Wednesday the 8th. Also participating were Marco Brambilla, Director of Engineering at Synapse Design and Drew Wingard, CTO at Sonics. The reality today is that device complexity in many applications has risen to levels that require increasing amounts of disc... » read more

Decoding The Brain


At the Design Automation Conference this year, Lou Scheffer, principal scientist for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, gave a visionary talk entitled Learning from Life: Biologically Inspired Electronic Design. Scheffer is an IC design guy who came through Stanford and Caltech and worked for HP and [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"] before switching to the medical field eight years a... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Design Automation Conference ARM Holdings announced that its DesignStart initiative to enable easy creation of chip designs using ARM Cortex-M0 intellectual property now takes in electronic design automation tools and design environments offered by Cadence Design Systems and Mentor Graphics. “Simplifying access to EDA tools from Cadence and Mentor Graphics will further spur rapid innovation,... » read more

DAC Day Four: Excitement And Risk


One thing that was new to DAC this year, was an art exhibit. These were pieces of artwork related to our industry, such as chip plots, or more abstract ideas based on design data or analyses. They received many more entrants than their wildest dreams and had to choose a winner from over 80 pieces, but the grand prize was won by a 3D model of a finFET by David Freid of Coventor. This piece was ... » read more

DAC Day Three: UVM, Machine Learning And DFT Come Together


The industry and users have a love/hate relationship with UVM. It has quickly risen to become the most used verification methodology and yet at the same time it is seen as being overly complex, unwieldy and difficult to learn. The third day of DAC gets started with breakfast with Accellera to discuss UVM and what we can expect to see in the next 5 years. The discussion was led by Tom Alsop, pri... » read more

DAC Day Two: Down To Business


DAC day two started with a breakfast presentation put on by Synopsys which included guests from ARM, TSMC and HiSilicon. It was titled Collaborating to Enable Design with the latest processors and finFET processes. Collaboration is a word that we hear increasingly when talking about the advanced nodes and today we are truly at the point where one company cannot do it all. Ron Moore, VP of ma... » read more

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