Executive Insight: Raik Brinkmann


[getperson id="11306" comment="Raik Brinkmann"], president and CEO of [getentity id="22395" e_name="OneSpin Solutions"], sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss where and why formal verification is gaining traction, and how it fits alongside other verification approaches. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: [getkc id="33" kc_name="Formal"] has been around for a whi... » read more

RTL Done And Other Bogus Development Milestones


My definition of progress has changed over the years. I don’t think about it much anymore but it was obvious in a talk I gave a few weeks ago to a diverse group of hardware developers. Part of that talk centered around how we define progress in design and verification. This is a normal thing for me; I was speaking to slides I’d used several times before and the message was no different than... » read more

An Unsustainable Divide


One of the great things about attending DVCon, or any other conference for that matter, is the networking. You get to see so many people who are eager to learn, to talk and to share ideas. When this happens, you tend to hear a lot of statements that have to rattle around in your mind for a while before you can start to make sense of them and see if any coherent themes emerge. By themes, I am... » read more

Seeing Debug for What It Is


Debug is problem solving. For many hardware developers, debug is a purpose. Finding a bug is a victory! Heck, debug can be flat out heroic. I’m sure we can all think back to colleagues that put in a few 80 hour, coffee fueled weeks, with managers peering over both shoulders, to fix an insidious string of bugs that threatened to further demolish a broken schedule and sabotage tape-out. W... » read more

Debug: Last Bastion Of Automation


There have been a number of times when anecdotal evidence became folk law and then over time, the effort was put in to find out whether there was any truth in it. Perhaps the most famous case is the statement that verification consumes 70% of development time and resources. For years this “fact” was used in almost every verification presentation and yet nobody knew where the number had come... » read more

Outlook 2016 – The year of Horizontal and Vertical Flow Integration


As 2015 comes to an end rapidly, the key question becomes what the next year will bring. Last year around this time, in my blog “The Next Big Shift In Verification”, I talked about software-driven verification as the next era of verification that follows the eras of directed testing and High-level Verification Language (HVL) driven verification. I also had referred to our System Development... » read more

Abstraction: Necessary But Evil


Abstraction allows aspects of a design to be described in an executable form much earlier in the flow. But some abstractions are breaking down, and an increasing amount of lower-level information has to be brought upstream in order to provide estimates that are close enough to reality so informed decisions can be made. The value of abstractions in design cannot be overstated. High levels of ... » read more

Executive Insight: Grant Pierce


Grant Pierce, president and CEO of Sonics, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the effects of industry consolidation, China's impact, and the unfolding security threat with the IoT. What follows are excerpts of that interview. SE: Consolidation is one of the big stories right now. What does that mean for your company and the industry as a whole? Pierce: It's a very inter... » read more

Next-Generation Power-Aware CDC Verification: What Have We Learned?


Reducing power consumption is essential to mobile and handheld application chips where reduced power contributes to longer battery life while minimally impacting performance. Reduced power consumption is achieved by partitioning an ASIC into multiple power domains, then controlling the power of these domains by switching off power or reducing voltage levels. Reduction of power consumption is fu... » read more

More Data, Different Approaches


Scaling, rising complexity, and integration are all contributing to an explosion in data, from initial design to physical layout to verification and into the manufacturing phase. Now the question is what to do with all of that data. For SoC designs, that data is critical for identifying real and potential problems. It also allows verification engineers working the back end of the design flow... » read more

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