A Formal Verification Method To Detect Timing Side Channels In MCU SoCs


A technical paper titled “A New Security Threat in MCUs – SoC-wide timing side channels and how to find them” was published by researchers at University of Kaiserslautern-Landau and Stanford University. Abstract: "Microarchitectural timing side channels have been thoroughly investigated as a security threat in hardware designs featuring shared buffers (e.g., caches) and/or parallelism b... » read more

Hardware-Accelerated RTL Simulator


A technical paper titled "Manticore: Hardware-Accelerated RTL Simulation with Static Bulk-Synchronous Parallelism" was published by researchers at EPFL, University of Tokyo, Sharif University, and Indian Institute of Technology. Abstract "The demise of Moore's Law and Dennard Scaling has revived interest in specialized computer architectures and accelerators. Verification and testing of thi... » read more

Data-Centric Reconfigurable Array Chiplets (Princeton)


A technical paper titled "Massive Data-Centric Parallelism in the Chiplet Era" was published by researchers at Princeton University. Abstract: "Traditionally, massively parallel applications are executed on distributed systems, where computing nodes are distant enough that the parallelization schemes must minimize communication and synchronization to achieve scalability. Mapping communica... » read more

Improving Performance And Simplifying Coding With XY Memory’s Implicit Parallelism


Instruction-level Parallelism (ILP) refers to design techniques that enable more than one RISC instruction to be executed simultaneously in the same instruction, which boosts processor performance by increasing the amount of work done in a given time interval, thereby increasing the throughput. This parallelism can be explicit, where each additional instruction is explicitly part of the instruc... » read more

Memory Access In AI Systems


Memory access is a key consideration in AI system design. Ron Lowman, strategic marketing manager for IP at Synopsys, talks about how memory affects overall power consumption, why partitioning of on-chip and off-chip is so critical to performance and power, and how this changes from the cloud to the edge. » read more

Simulation: Go Parallel Or Go Home


Although complemented by other valuable technologies, functional simulation remains at the heart of semiconductor verification. Every chip project still develops a testbench, usually compliant with the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM), and a large test suite. Constrained-random stimulus generation has largely replaced hand-crafted tests, but at the expense of much more simulation time. ... » read more

Divided On System Partitioning


Building an optimal implementation of a system using a functional description has been an industry goal for a long time, but it has proven to be much more difficult than it sounds. The general idea is to take software designed to run on a processor and to improve performance using various types of alternative hardware. That performance can be specified in various ways and for specific applic... » read more

Plasticine: A Reconfigurable Architecture For Parallel Patterns (Stanford)


Source: Stanford University Stanford University has been developing Plasticine, which allows parallel patterns to be reconfigured. "ABSTRACT Reconfigurable architectures have gained popularity in recent years as they allow the design of energy-efficient accelerators. Fine-grain fabrics (e.g. FPGAs) have traditionally suffered from performance and power inefficiencies due to bit-level ... » read more

Does System Design Still Need Abstraction?


About 15 years ago, the assumption in the EDA industry was that system design would be inevitable. The transition from gate-level design to a new entry point at the register transfer level (RTL) seemed complete with logic synthesis becoming well-adopted. The next step seemed to be so obvious at the time: High-level synthesis (HLS) and transaction-based development beyond RTL—also taking into ... » read more

Address Simulation Turn-Around Time Bottlenecks with VCS Fine-Grained Parallelism


Non-stop growth in design size and complexity makes it more difficult than ever for verification teams to keep up with project demands and product goals. According to the Synopsys 2017 Global User Survey, “Verification taking longer than planned” is the top reason for tapeout delays, and “Simulation runtime performance” is the top challenge for verification. Since regression test turn-a... » read more

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