Unifying Hardware-Assisted Verification And Validation Using UVM And Emulation


Successful approaches to improve verification productivity are to increase the speed of verification and begin validating software/hardware integration very early in the design process. Historically, verification and validation platforms have been developed as separate flows, preventing reuse of modules and methods between the two. As a consequence, various customized verification and validatio... » read more

Unifying Hardware-Assisted Verification And Validation Using UVM And Emulation


Successful approaches to improve verification productivity are to increase the speed of verification and begin validating software/hardware integration very early in the design process. Historically, verification and validation platforms have been developed as separate flows, preventing reuse of modules and methods between the two. As a consequence, various customized verification and validatio... » read more

Experts At The Table: SoC Prototyping


By Ann Steffora Mutschler System-Level Design sat down to discuss SoC prototyping with Hillel Miller, pre-silicon verification/emulation manager at Freescale Semiconductor; Frank Schirrmeister, group director, product marketing, system development suite at Cadence; and Mick Posner, director of product marketing at Synopsys. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SLD: Is it possib... » read more

Software Debug Gets Tricky


By Ann Steffora Mutschler As designs continue to grow in size and complexity, that complexity has led to an increasing number of processing cores. Additional cores, in turn, allow for additional software to be run on those cores, and debugging the software becomes critical. Traditionally, emulation has played a significant role in verifying that software against RTL code, and continues to d... » read more

Dealing With New Bottlenecks


By Ed Sperling While the number of options for improving efficiency and performance in designs continues to increase, the number of challenges in getting chips at advanced process nodes out the door is increasing, too. Thinner wires, routing congestion, more power domains, IP integration and lithography issues are conspiring to make design much more difficult than in the past. So why aren�... » read more

The New Verification Landscape


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Verification technologies and tools have never been more sophisticated. But putting together a methodology is more than just putting tools together. It starts with trying to get a handle on the complexity, knowing what to test, how to test and when. “UVM was standardized and people have been working to adopt that which has been generally a positive,” said Steve Ba... » read more

Drowning In Data


By Ed Sperling The old adage, “Be careful what you wish for,” has hit the SoC design market like a 100-year storm. After years of demanding more data to understand what’s going on in a design, engineering teams now have so much data that they’re drowning in it. This is most obvious at advanced process nodes, of course. But it’s also true these days at more mainstream nodes such as... » read more

The Week In Review: May 31


By Ed Sperling Mentor Graphics and GlobalFoundries teamed up to deliver 20nm design kits that include Mentor’s place and route tool, including verification and conflict resolution engines for double-patterning violations. The 20nm process is used for GlobalFoundries’ 14nm finFETs. Mentor also received 16nm finFET certification from TSMC for the same tools plus its physical verification pl... » read more

Dealing With The Data Glut


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Tools like emulation and simulation are an absolute necessity to design and verify today’s complex SoCs, but what happens when you want to do power analysis and the file sizes are too massive for the emulator to handle? Even with an emulator a five-minute mobile phone call could take three months. Understandably, this issue is causing pain to many design teams... » read more

Mythbusting: Co-Design


By Ann Steffora Mutschler It turns out that while there needs to be understanding between hardware and software engineers, the people doing the programming don’t actually want or need to interact. There is not, nor probably ever will be, one single team with hardware and software engineers happily working together on a project. But it’s not a total disconnect. There are a number o... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →