Asynchronous Design: Is It Time Yet?


Non-mainstream technologies can offer advantages over more commonly used approaches, but usually at some additional cost (otherwise they’d probably be mainstream). The additional cost could be in design time, area, testability or whatever, and it might even be only a temporary disadvantage. If comparable time and energy were invested in the new technology, perhaps the additional costs would d... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Tools Cadence unveiled Genus, their next-generation RTL synthesis and physical synthesis engine incorporating a multi-level massively parallel architecture and physically aware context-generation capability. Using it for their recent PowerVR GE7800 GPU, Imagination reported a 5X improvement in turnaround time versus the previous Cadence synthesis solution with no impact on power, performance... » read more

Week 52: It’s Show Time


We made it. This is blog No. 52 on our joint journey to DAC. Part of me can’t believe that Monday I will be opening the 52nd Design Automation Conference. It’s been a roller-coaster year of ups and downs, and I know for sure that without my amazing peers on the DAC executive committee, the conference never would have come together. Thank you guys – you have been great to work with. Let’... » read more

Round-Trip Engineering Key To AUTOSAR-Based Development


This paper discusses how round-trip engineering can be used as an iterative development process and describes interoperability between tools from Mentor and MathWorks. Model-based design has become an important component in vehicle manufacturer and supplier development processes. Electronic control units are complex in terms of functionality, connectivity, and variants; therefore automotive ... » read more

Blog Review: June 3


An emergency torch that lets you breathe while escaping a smoke-filled building; a car that shrinks to fit into parking spaces that aren't quite big enough: from extreme situations to everyday activities, Ansys' Justin Nescott features devices designed to make life easier and safer in his picks for week’s top five engineering articles. Check out the prosthetic foot that takes commands from se... » read more

Emulation for Power


Solving power problems in today’s leading-edge SoCs requires not only the best architectural choices but advanced tools and techniques to determine the right path to take. This equates to a combination of hardware emulation and power analysis/optimization software tools. Design teams today must have real-life scenarios to accurately predict the power impact of their architectural decisions... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Mergers & Acquisitions Synopsys' list of security acquisitions grew with a definitive agreement to buy certain assets of Quotium, including the interactive application security testing product Seeker and its R&D team. The acquisition builds on static analysis technology from Coverity and Codenomicon's fuzz testing and software vulnerability assessment tools. Terms of the deal have no... » read more

Week 51: Who’s Driving To DAC?


It’s come to the point where I’m counting the days to DAC – especially nerve wracking considering how much I still have to do to get ready. Just this morning I spoke with Jeff Massimilla and Craig Smith about their Wednesday morning keynote dialogue on connected cars. Helping pull together #52DAC, which includes loads of excellent content on automotive systems, has driven home (sorry) how... » read more

When Things Go Wrong Even When You’re Doing the Right Thing


By Kurt Takara and Joe Hupcey III “Isolation. Retention. Level shifters. Dynamic voltage scaling. I’m doing all the right things to reduce the power consumption of my design by adding all of this power control logic. But because of this new low power circuitry, I’m seeing fresh clock domain crossing (CDC) problems that are making my design do all the wrong things; and my trusty old low... » read more

M&A Season Now Officially Open


A year ago many people were making jokes quite openly about the IoT. It wasn't uncommon to hear quips about the Internet of Nothing, the Internet of Disconnected Things, the Internet of Cars, or some other variant that questioned just how connected everything would become. The tenor of the conversation has changed significantly in the past year. The jokes are fewer, the stakes are higher. An... » read more

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