Digital Twins Deciphered


Ever since Siemens acquired Mentor Graphics in 2016, a new phrase has become more common in the semiconductor industry – the digital twin. Exactly what that is, and what impact it will have on the semiconductor industry, is less clear. In fact, many in the industry are scratching their heads over the term. The initial reaction is that the industry has been creating what are now termed digi... » read more

Baum: Finding SoC Power Flaws


A South Korean startup founded by a Samsung engineer-turned-researcher has created a tool that finds power design flaws early in the SoC design process. The startup, Baum, Inc., launched the second version of its power-modeling solution in June at DAC. The product is a power design-verification tool that uses high-level models to create analyses designed to spot design flaws that could creat... » read more

Electronic System-Level Design: Are We There Yet?


I am writing this while attending NI Week in Austin and am admittedly wowed by National Instruments’ open test platform. NI Week’s theme is “Developing the Future Faster.” The Tuesday keynote included guest speakers from Mazda, Honeywell, and NXP, and these were great examples of system-level design of different scopes, from cars to distributed systems to chips enabling them. Personally... » read more

How To Handle Concurrency


The evolution of processing architectures has solved many problems within a chip, but for each problem solved another one was created. Concurrency is one of those issues, and it has been getting much more attention lately. While concurrency is hardly a new problem, the complexity of today’s systems is making it increasingly difficult to properly design, implement and verify the software an... » read more

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

Whatever Happened to High-Level Synthesis?


A few years ago, [getkc id="105" comment="high-level synthesis"] (HLS) was probably the most talked about emerging technology that was to be the heart of a new [getkc id="48" kc_name="Electronic System Level"] (ESL) flow. Today, we hear much less about the progress being made in this area. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss this with Bryan Bowyer, director of engineering for high lev... » read more

Whatever Happened To High-Level Synthesis?


A few years ago, [getkc id="105" comment="high-level synthesis"] (HLS) was probably the most talked about emerging technology. It was to be the heart of a new Electronic System Level (ESL) flow. Today, we hear much less about the progress being made in this area. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss this with Bryan Bowyer, director of engineering for high level design and verificati... » read more

Early Power Modeling Using SystemC And TSMC System-PPA


Power consumption is often more important than performance in today’s SoC designs because of battery size and power dissipation limitations. The dilemma is that the most leverage available to optimize power consumption is at the architectural design stage, but there often is not enough information available early enough to make accurate power decisions. On the performance side, SystemC mod... » read more

ESL Flow is Dead


It was 20 years ago that Gary Smith coined the term [getkc id="48" comment="Electronic System Level"] (ESL). He foresaw the next logical migration in abstraction up from the [getkc id="49" comment="Register Transfer Level"] (RTL) to something that would be capable of describing and building complex electronic systems. He also saw that the future of EDA depended upon who would control that marke... » read more

Powerful New Standard


In December 2015, the IEEE released the latest version of the 1801 specification, titled the IEEE standard for design and verification of low-power integrated circuits, but most people know it as UPF or the Unified Power Format. The standard provides a way to specify the power intent associated with a design. With it, a designer can define the various power states of the design and the contexts... » read more

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