Why Your NoC Verification Strategy Must Consider Using Formal


By Ashish Darbari and Bing Xue It’d be inconceivable these days to design a modern high-performance SoC without a network-on-chip (NoC) fabric. AI hyperscalers are inherently multi-threaded and rely on using hundreds of processing elements (PEs). Crossbar-based fabric would just not scale. What also changes with the adoption of the NoC is how to handle coherency between PEs. ACE is no long... » read more

The Next Big Thing


Sometimes, we spend so much time looking for the next big thing that we actually miss something even bigger. I have to admit I was guilty of this while employed by a large EDA company 20 years ago. I was one of those ESL people — Electronic System Level acolytes, with Gary Smith as our standard bearer. We wanted to do many things, including raising the level of abstraction for design and veri... » read more

Moving Past “It Works” — Intelligent Optimization Is the Key to PCB Excellence


In the fast-evolving field of electronic systems design, engineers are under increasing pressure to deliver innovative, high-performance products within ever-shrinking development cycles. Traditional methods—relying on intuition, trial-and-error testing, and even basic simulation—struggle to keep pace with the growing complexity of modern systems. Nowhere is this more evident than in printe... » read more

How To Optimize Silicon Utilization To Improve PPA


In the semiconductor industry, optimizing Power, Performance, and Area (PPA) is a key challenge for designers and architects. Balancing these three factors often involves making trade-offs. Improving one variable might lead to sacrificing others. For example, boosting performance may result in increased power consumption and a larger silicon area, or some power-reducing techniques might reduce ... » read more

New Innovative Way To Functionally Verify Heterogeneous 2D/3D Package Connectivity


Historically, IC package design has been a relatively simple task which allowed the die bumps to be fanned out to a geometry suitable for connecting to a printed circuit board. The package netlist was often captured by the package designer, typically using Excel to manually assign net names to the desired die bumps and BGA balls to achieve the intended connection. Modern package and interpos... » read more

Complete Transistor Level Electrical Checks With Formal Analysis


Nothing is worse for a design team than a chip that fails to work in the bringup lab. Electrical problems are historically a major cause of such failures. Power leaks, power-ground DC paths, missing level shifters, and design flaws such as high fanout lead to unexpected power consumption, incorrect functionality, and even total meltdown. Designers learned years ago that pre-silicon electrical c... » read more

RISC-V Verification: From Simulation To Formal


Axiomise's Nicky Khodadad and Ashish Darbari discuss simulation and the need for formal verification and RISC-V, including why simulation-based verification is inadequate to find all the bugs in a design and how formal verification can help with bug hunting for corner-case bugs and exhaustive proofs of bug absence. » read more

Verification In Crisis


Why is it still so hard to ensure good quality sign-off happens without leaving behind bugs in silicon? The answer, according to my colleagues at DVCon, is highly nuanced. The industry has been improving overall, as has the complexity of designs. For ASICs, 74% of the designs surveyed in the recent Wilson Research Group/Siemens EDA report have one or more processor cores, 52% have two or mor... » read more

Interoperability And Automation Yield A Scalable And Efficient Safety Workflow


By Ann Keffer, Arun Gogineni, and James Kim Cars deploying ADAS and AV features rely on complex digital and analog systems to perform critical real-time applications. The large number of faults that need to be tested in these modern automotive designs make performing safety verification using a single technology impractical. Yet, developing an optimized safety methodology with specific f... » read more

What’s Required To Secure Chips


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about how to verify that a semiconductor design will be secure, with Mike Borza, Synopsys scientist; John Hallman, product manager for trust and security at Siemens EDA; Pete Hardee, group director for product management at Cadence; Paul Karazuba, vice president of marketing at Expedera; and Dave Kelf, CEO of Breker Verification. ... » read more

← Older posts