Portable Stimulus Status Report


The first release of the Portable Stimulus (PS) standard is slated for early next year. If it lives up to its promise, it could be the first new language and abstraction for verification in two decades. [getentity id="22028" e_name="Accellera"] uncorked the PS Early Adopter release at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in June. The standard has been more than two years in the making by t... » read more

When Is Verification Complete?


Deciding when verification is done is becoming a much more difficult decision, prompting verification teams to increasingly rely on metrics rather than just the tests listed in the verification plan. This trend has been underway for the past couple of process nodes, but it takes time to spot trends and determine whether they are real or just aberrations. The Wilson Research Group conducts a ... » read more

Emulating Systems Of Systems


System design is all the craze these days. I have been in notably more discussions recently about how one can verify systems of systems. Does an airplane or a car lend itself to an array of emulators? Are multiple abstractions needed? How can design teams span electrical, mechanical, and thermal—as well as analog and digital—effects? Do companies need to re-organize to deal with system desi... » read more

How Much Verification Is Necessary?


Since the advent of IC design flows, starting with RTL descriptions in languages like Verilog or VHDL, project teams have struggled with how much verification can and should be performed by the original RTL developers. Constrained-random methods based on high-level languages such as [gettech id="31021" t_name="e"] or [gettech id="31023" comment="SystemVerilog"] further cemented the role of t... » read more

Hybrid Emulation


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the growing usage of hybrid verification approaches with Frank Schirrmeister, senior group director of product management & marketing for [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"]; Russ Klein, program director for pre-silicon debug products at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor, a Siemens Business"]; [getperson id="11027" comment="Phil Moorby"],... » read more

Estimating Power And Performing Optimization


Power analysis and optimization have gained importance over the last few years. During this time it has become obvious how critical it is to use realistic payloads to accurately estimate power and perform optimization tasks. Designers have a range of different objectives and concerns when it comes to power. On one side, a team wants to ensure that the average power of their chip is low enough t... » read more

Verification Unification


Semiconductor Engineering brought together industry luminaries to initiate the discussion about the role that formal technologies will play with the recently released early adopter's draft of Portable Stimulus and how it may help to bring the two execution technologies closer together. Participating in this roundtable are Joe Hupcey, verification product technologist for [getentity id="22017" e... » read more

Cutting CapEx, Not Capacity


‘The cloud’ has been an industry buzz word for some time now, and while the initial focus was on data storage and sharing - and spawned the likes of Dropbox – ‘cloud computing’ is currently the latest trend. For instance, Amazon’s cloud platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), gives users access to servers and a range of applications. Storage is available as before but so too now are... » read more

DAC 2017: A Glimpse Of How The Future Is Enabled


Last week’s Design Automation Conference in Austin gave great examples on how the future is enabled with next generation tools today. My favorite portions were Uhnder’s overview on “Agile Emulation” in the cloud, SirusXM’s presentation on how they used our portfolio of emulation and FPGA-based prototyping, the panel on “Smarter Verification” that I had organized and – of course ... » read more

Verification In The Cloud


By Ed Sperling Leasing of cloud-based verification resources on an as-needed basis is finally beginning to gain traction after more than a decade of false starts and over-optimistic expectations. All of the major EDA vendors now offer cloud-based services. They view this as a way of either supplementing a chipmaker's existing resources at various peak use times, or for small and midsize com... » read more

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