Experts At The Table: The Trouble With Corners


By Ed Sperling Low-Power Engineering sat down to discuss corners with PV Srinivas, senior director of engineering at Mentor Graphics; Dipesh Patel, vice president of engineering for physical IP at ARM; Lisa Minwell, director of technical marketing at Virage Logic; and Jim McCanny, CEO of Altos Design Automation. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. LPE: Corners appears to be get... » read more

ESL Requires New Approaches To Design And Verification


By Ann Steffora Mutschler As more data gets front loaded into SoC architectures today, understanding verification challenges as well as communication between the front and back end has never been more critical. “All of this is getting more complicated,” said John Ford, director of marketing at ARM. “There was a time when an ARM processor core was all that was on a chip. Now there’s ... » read more

‘Good’ Vs. ‘Good Enough’


By Ed Sperling The decision for when a chip is ready for tapeout is changing—both in time and sometimes in terms of who’s actually making that decision—as the amount of software being developed by hardware companies continues to grow. At the root of this shift are two very different concepts about what constitutes a market-ready product. For SoC engineers, fixing bugs after a chip has... » read more

The Power Of Standards


By Barry Pangrle It’s often said that the wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. As an industry, EDA seems to have a short memory as VMM and OVM (now becoming UVM), VHDL and Verilog, and more recently UPF and CPF. In cases where one standard suffices, it is horribly inefficient to create multiple “standards.” It is a waste of effort and resources for ED... » read more

The Power Of IP


By Ann Steffora Mutschler As the number of design starts goes down the corresponding complexity of SoCs has gone up—and continues to grow. Everyone is looking at the value they can bring to the table as increasing proportions of SoCs are either reused from pre-existing IP within the company designing the chip or brought in from outside. Because is economically impractical to start an SoC... » read more

Keeping Models In Sync


By Ed Sperling Models and higher levels of abstraction have been hailed as the best choice for developing SoCs at advanced process nodes, but at 28nm and beyond even that approach is showing signs of stress. The number of models needed for a complex SoC has been growing at each new process node, which makes it much more difficult to keep them updated and in sync as the design progresses down t... » read more

End User Report: EDA Industry Realignment


By Ann Steffora Mutschler The EDA industry has seen a number of large acquisitions as of late, most notably of Denali by Cadence, as well as CoWare, VaST and Virage Logic which were acquired by Synopsys, but just what impact does this realignment have on the biggest EDA customers? Commenting on these changes is Jean-Marc Chateau, director of system platforms and tools at STMicroelectronics, ... » read more

The Future Of IP


By Ed Sperling The rapid consolidation of the IP business is raising big questions about who will be left, whether new companies will join, and what it means for chipmakers looking to buy IP. In a period of one month Synopsys bought Virage Logic, which had just finished a buying spree of its own with the acquisitions of ARC and the IP business of NXP, and Cadence bought Denali. So what exac... » read more

The Tide Is Turning


By Jon McDonald I was at DAC last week. Over the course of the week I had a chance to talk with a significant number of customers and others in the industry. As has been the case the past few years there was good interest in system-level design. But from my perspective the tone of the discussions experienced a major shift this year. In the past, much of the discussion was around “why—wh... » read more

The Power Of The Customer Experience


By Barry Pangrle Consumers of electronics don’t buy chips, they buy products or gadgets. Sure the geeks among us may know about “the chip” in a PC, typically in reference to the CPU or maybe even the GPU. But there are many chips in the product and you’d have to be an über-geek to know all of them. How many customers actually know the primary SoC in their smart phone? The point is ... » read more

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