Blog Review: Jan. 15


Mentor’s Colin Walls digs into safety-critical sensors for cars, which are essential to the operation of a variety of systems in vehicles. The number of redundant sensors increases proportionate to the risk from failure, something that has been an accepted practice in mil/aero markets for years. Cadence’s Brian Fuller gazes into a crystal ball and concludes that while the semiconductor i... » read more

Tech Talk: FPGA Prototyping


Neil Songcuan, senior product marketing manager at Synopsys, examines the hidden time savings from using an FPGA prototype platform for IP validation and software development, in addition to hardware design. While FPGA prototypes are a well known way of speeding up hardware design, their value in IP validation and software development for an integrated SoC is just beginning to surface. [you... » read more

Week In Review: System-Level Design


Synopsys extended its FPGA prototyping board with a new version that is optimized for IP and subsystems. This is particularly interesting given the fact that Synopsys is one of the largest IP providers and currently sells subsystems based on its ARC processor IP. Among the new features are support for 4 million gates for software development and hardware-software integration, as well as synthes... » read more

Experts At The Table: Next-Generation IP Landscape


By Ann Steffora Mutschler System-Level Design sat down to discuss predictions about the next generation design IP landscape with Robert Aitken, R&D fellow at ARM; Laurent Moll, chief technical officer at Arteris; Susan Peterson, group director, product marketing for verification IP & memory models in the system & software realization group at Cadence; and John Koeter, vice preside... » 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

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, for the system development suite at Cadence; and Mick Posner, director of product marketing at Synopsys. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SLD: How... » read more

Prototyping Now A ‘Must Have’


By Ann Steffora Mutschler No longer a ‘nice to have,’ FPGA-based prototyping is now indispensible for SoC and ASIC development. Semiconductor companies are investing in the infrastructure, the EDA tool chain, the human resources and everything needed to set up an entire department to focus on prototyping, emulation and validation. “We are seeing these customers invest in significant a... » read more

On Design Productivity And Cost of Ownership …


By Frank Schirrmeister Last weekend I spent time with my 7 ½-year-old daughter (the ½ is crucially important at that age) on our tree house project. Well, it is more a tree “deck” so far, which is quite respectable though given that we just started building it in one weekend (as the book I quickly downloaded that evening on the iPad actually recommended). A project like this gives endles... » read more

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