Using Processor Trace At The System Level


The race to process more data faster using less power is creating a series of debug challenges at the system level, where developers need to be able to trace interactions across multiple and often heterogeneous processing elements that may function independently of each other. In general, trace is a hardware debug feature that allows the run-time behavior of IP to be monitored. More specific... » read more

Simulation: Balancing Speed And Debug


There’s an old saying about simulation: “It’s all about the need for speed.” Simulation is the core technology for functional verification of semiconductors, and the demand for higher runtime performance never ebbs. Larger chips require more complex testbenches and much larger test suites since verification grows exponentially with increase in design size. With the diminishing return an... » read more

Building A Safety Verification Flow


Sal Alvarez, senior manager of application engineering at Synopsys, explains how safety verification differs from functional verification, what changes with failure mode effects analysis, and how to determine and verify the effectiveness of safety features. » read more

Speeding Up Verification Using SystemC


Brett Cline, senior vice president at OneSpin Solutions, explains how adding formal verification into the high-level synthesis flow can reduce the time spent in optimization and debug by about two-thirds, why this needs to be done well ahead of RTL, starting with issues such as initialization, memory out of bounds and other issues that are difficult to find in simulation. » read more

Speeding Up FPGA Development


Salaheddin Hetalani, field application engineer at OneSpin Solutions, talks about why it’s getting harder to design and debug FPGAs, how much design time can be saved through formal techniques, and why just relying on programmability isn’t the most efficient approach. » read more

Hybrid Prototyping


David Svensson, applications engineer in Synopsys’ Verification Group, explains how a virtual transaction logic model can be connected to develop hardware-dependent drivers before RTL actually exists, why this is now critical for large, complex designs, and how to find the potential bottlenecks and debug both software and hardware. » read more

Context-Aware Debug


Moses Satyasekaran, product manager at Mentor, a Siemens Business, examines the growing complexity of debug, which now includes software, power intent and integration, multiple clocking and reset domains, and much more, where the limitations are for debug, and how automotive, functional safety and mixed signal affect the overall process. » read more

Renesas Solves High-Level Verification Challenges Using Formal Equivalence Checking


A team at Renesas Electronics Corporation found that they were significantly reducing the time advantages of their High-Level Synthesis flow due to bugs in their SystemC code and equivalence problems due to design changes. It was taking too much time to find and debug these issues and some bugs were slipping into the generated RTL. To solve these challenges, they added SLEC®, which is the form... » read more

Verdi Transaction Debug Platform: A Simplified Way To Debug IIP Designs And SoC


Authors: Abhishek Upadhyay, R&D Engineer, Synopsys, and Kanak Rajput, Application Engineer, Synopsys Design problems that appear in the late phases of the development cycle can be extremely difficult to track down and debug, thus putting project schedules at risk. It’s not uncommon for an engineer to run the verification test on what appears to be the main design problem, only to find the ... » read more

Power Complexity On The Rise


New chip architectures and custom applications are adding significant challenges to chip design and verification, and the problems are becoming much more complex as low power is added into the mix. Power always has been a consideration in design, but in the past it typically involved different power domains that were either on, off, or in some level of sleep mode. As hardware architectures s... » read more

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