Formal Verification For Post-Silicon Debug


Bug escape costs grow considerably with each and every subsequent step in the design flow, to the point of being exorbitantly high once at the silicon level. As a result, these high costs of bug escape are driving customers to embrace formal verification for post-silicon debug and to begin using formal far earlier in the flow for their next design projects. The Cadence JasperGold Verification S... » read more

Case Studies In Double-Patterning Debug


Double patterning (DP) impacts just about every part of the design and manufacturing flows. However, the kinds of issues you encounter, the way they manifest themselves, and the ideal way to address them may be very different in different parts of these flows. I feel like I have spent a lot of time the last six months or so working with place and route (P&R) and chip finishing engineers on DP i... » read more

Mentor, Cadence Join Forces


Mentor Graphics and Cadence have agreed to create a single binary interface for their respective simulation and emulation platforms, allowing debug tools from one vendor to run on the other's platforms. The two have invited [getentity id="22035" e_name="Synopsys"] to join their initiative, as well. So far, there is no decision. The move proposes a single API for both [getentity id="22032"... » read more

Automating Root-Cause Analysis To Reduce Time To Find Bugs by Up To 50%


If you’re spending more than 50% of your verification effort in debug, you’re not alone. For many design, verification, and embedded software engineers as well as engineers verifying complex standard protocols, debug is the primary bottleneck in verification. Most debug today is completed using the traditional methodology of print statements paired with waveforms. Given that today’s desig... » read more

Blog Review: April 15


How much memory do you need to look 13 billion years in the past? Rambus' Aharon Etengoff ponders the Square Kilometre Array's massive number of radio telescopes and what it means for computing. NXP's Martin Schoessler argues that for smart cities to work for their citizens, both technology companies and government entities will need a new mind-set. Reinventing the wheel is a good thing i... » read more

Does Fast Simulation Help Debug Productivity?


It is nice when a reporter manages to get the scoop of the century, and that was the case at a lunch panel hosted by [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"] at the recent Design and Verification Conference (DVCon) in Santa Clara, CA. Brian Bailey, technology editor for Semiconductor Engineer was the moderator for the panel and broke the news to the crowd. Cadence had developed a logic [getkc id... » read more

Tech Talk: Better Coverage


Atrenta's Yuan Lu talks about code coverage, functional coverage and the use of assertions in debugging designs. [youtube vid=Hpm-l1z8HTo] » read more

Debug This!


Class-based debug is not the same as debugging RTL. You don’t have to be an object-oriented programmer in order to debug a class-based testbench, which is just a bunch of objects – some statically created, some dynamic – which interact with the DUT. The upshot? Class based debug doesn’t have to be hard! To read more, click here. » read more

Emulation Uses Increase


For more than two decades, [getkc id="30" comment="emulation"] was a technology in search of a market. While on paper it has always made sense to speed up simulation, using hardware acceleration was so pricey that few companies could justify the cost. Fast-forward to today and emulation is a major contributor to the bottom line at all of the Big Three [getkc id="7" kc_name="EDA"] companies. ... » read more

Applying Lessons Of Mass Production To Verification


I’ve recently been experiencing that time-honored tradition of helping an elderly family member as they go through one surgery after another attempting to restore worn-out, miscellaneous body parts. What’s most surprising, beyond the costs, is that shopping for a knee or disc replacement is much like shopping for a car. Do you go for the high-performance knee, which maybe hasn’t been test... » read more

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