Challenges In IC And Electronic Systems Verification


By Aveek Sarkar Designing successful electronic systems that can meet the needs of a challenging and quickly evolving mobile market requires design teams to solve critical problems such as power efficiency, unrealistic schedules, and cost-down considerations. In this first of a three-part series, we will look at these challenges. Part 1: The Growing Challenges Designing electronic systems ... » read more

Executive Briefing: Wally Rhines


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design, as part of its ongoing executive briefing series, sat down with Wally Rhines, Mentor Graphics' chairman and CEO, to talk about future problems, opportunities, and the gray areas that could go either way. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SLD: Is the amount of time spent on verification increasing? Rhines: It depends on how you define who s... » read more

Staying Neutral


By Kurt Shuler It’s official: The great IP land grab has begun. The process actually has been taking place gradually, but has accelerated with Imagination Technologies’ acquisition of MIPS last year and, most recently, Cadence’s acquisition of Tensilica. For makers of semiconductors, four competing IP behemoths are emerging after years of fragmentation within the semiconductor IP indu... » read more

Solutions For Mixed-Signal IP, IC, And SoC Implementation


Traditional mixed-signal design environments, in which analog and digital parts are implemented separately, are no longer sufficient and lead to excess iteration and prolonged design cycle time. Realizing modern mixed-signal designs requires new flows that maximize productivity and facilitate close collaboration among analog and digital designers. This paper outlines mixed-signal implem... » read more

Experts At The Table: The Trouble With Low-Power Verification


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss low-power verification with Leah Clark, associate technical director at Broadcom; Erich Marschner, product marketing manager at Mentor Graphics; Cary Chin, director of marketing for low-power solutions at Synopsys; and Venki Venkatesh, senior director of engineering at Atrenta. What follows are excerpts of that conversat... » read more

Sprint To The Finish Line


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss future challenges, pain points, and how the supply chain is being reconfigured with Chi-Ping Hsu, senior vice president for R&D in the Silicon Realization Group at Cadence. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. LPHP: How important is it to be at the front end of Moore’s Law? Hsu: Strategically, it’... » read more

Guesswork, And Other Design Paradigms


PPA for soft IP seems like an oxymoron. How do you determine the implementation characteristics (PPA — Power, Performance and Area) for something that has not yet been implemented? Flying blind until implementation would be a rookie move. More likely you are going to estimate based on a prior implementation. Not a bad approach if the IP hasn’t changed significantly and the target library is... » read more

Let The IP Wars Begin


y Ed Sperling Nature abhors a vacuum. Customers abhor a monopoly. It appears both problems are now being solved in the EDA world—assuming approval by regulatory agencies, of course. There have been two concerns facing chipmakers in regards to third-party IP. One is political. Most large companies spent millions of dollars and thousands of frustrating man-hours developing their own interna... » read more

Surprises Abound As Subsystem IP Gains Prominence


What’s new in the world of subsystem intellectual property? To find out, System-Level Design sat down with Richard Wawrzyniak, senior market analyst for ASICs and SoCs at Semico Research Corp. What follow are excerpts of that conversation. SLD: You mentioned that the cost of semiconductor intellectual property (IP) at 20nm and below is increasing. Why is that? Wawrzyniak: The reason is c... » read more

Advanced SoC Interconnect IP


By Kurt Shuler I am thoroughly enjoying 2013. That’s because there seems to be a lot more reason for optimism this year than last year. But before we let go of 2012, it’s important to reflect on the past year and see what it can teach us so we can make better business decisions moving forward. The one lesson learned is that flexibility for SoC designs is increasingly more important. In ... » read more

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