Beyond The Water Cooler: 2020 Report On IC/ASIC Design And Verification Trends


Verification and design engineers like to talk shop and discuss their experiences and visions. But even though engineers sharing stories around the water cooler (whatever form that takes—conferences, blogs, etc.) does provide all kinds of valuable insights, it doesn’t provide the full picture into the very large and complicated and extremely dynamic global semiconductor industry. To better ... » read more

Accelerate Adoption Of High-Speed, Low-Latency, Cache-Coherent Standards Using Formal Verification


We continue to see huge growth in data and compute demand, fueled by increased global data traffic with the 5G rollout, the prevalence of streaming services, and expanded artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) applications. Several new industry-standard specifications have emerged in recent years to define the protocols of the underlying electronic components and IP building block... » read more

Precision: A Case Study For Success


Recently, I was watching a documentary on the NASA Perseverance mission to Mars. I’ve always been fascinated by space travel and the engineering efforts to make it happen. We’ve all heard that the landing for this trip to Mars was the most precise in history, but what the documentary brought to light is the precision involved in each and every aspect of the Perseverance Rover design and dev... » read more

Continuing Challenges For Open-Source Verification


Experts at the Table: This is the last part of the series of articles derived from the DVCon panel that discussed Verification in the Era of Open Source. It takes the discussion beyond what happened in the panel and utilizes some of the questions that were posed, but never presented to the panelists due to lack of time. Contributing to the discussion are Ashish Darbari, CEO of Axiomise; Serge L... » read more

Scaling Simulation


Without functional simulation the semiconductor industry would not be where it is today, but some people in the industry contend it hasn't received the attention and research it deserves, causing a stagnation in performance. Others disagree, noting that design sizes have increased by orders of magnitude while design times have shrunk, pointing to simulation remaining a suitable tool for the job... » read more

The Case For FPGA Equivalence Checking


Formal Equivalence Checking (EC) has become a standard part of the ASIC development flow, replacing almost all gate level simulation with a rigorous consistency check between pre- and post-synthesized code. In the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) space, EC is still a relatively new concept, but is rapidly becoming important given the large devices being employed today. For the largest FP... » read more

New Methodologies Create New Opportunities


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss what open source verification means today and what it should evolve into, with Jean-Marie Brunet, senior director for the Emulation Division at Siemens EDA; Ashish Darbari, CEO of Axiomise; Simon Davidmann, CEO of Imperas Software; Serge Leef, program manager in the Microsystems Technology Office at DARPA; Tao Liu, staff hardwa... » read more

Unlock Your Vision… And A Bit Of EDA History


Repetitive patterns and hardware designs have something in common: there may be more than meets the eye. Even simple designs can have corner cases that are hard to detect by code review alone, and the situation is even more complex if third-party or legacy IP is involved. What if the IP has a deliberately hidden function? This is where verification tools like OneSpin 360 come in, to remove huma... » read more

Verification Knowledge At Your Fingertips


If you’re like most engineers, you’re curious about how other engineers tackle some of the most difficult challenges. What can you absorb from them and apply to your own projects? Learning from experience has tremendous value but learning from others’ experiences is arguably more valuable since the cost to acquire that knowledge is significantly cheaper. At OneSpin, we’ve lowered... » read more

AI And ML Applications Require Advanced Datapath Verification


In popular usage, the term “artificial intelligence” (AI) once conjured up images of robot armies subjugating humans or evil computers outsmarting their users, as in '2001: A Space Odyssey.' In recent years, AI has become a part of daily life for much of the planet’s population. People use voice commands to interact with their smartphones, smart speakers and even TV remote controls. Sophi... » read more

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