UltraSoC: Debug IP

By Ed Sperling - 03 Nov, 2015 - Comments: 0

The background noise across the engineering community is rising with the growing complexity of SoCs. While the big news several years ago was the introduction of chips with 1 billion transistors, that's no longer making headlines. There are now well over 1 billion transistors in advanced SoCs and more than 100 IP blocks. Even abstractions are beginning to break down (see related story). Ent... » read more

NoC Versus PIN: Size Matters

By Drew Wingard - 09 Oct, 2015 - Comments: 1

Since I first helped introduce the concept of applying networking techniques to address SoC integration challenges in 2007, I have been asked many hundreds of times how to determine when and where to best use an on-chip network (NoC) instead of a passive interconnect network (PIN)? Is there a minimum number of initiators and targets below which it makes more sense to use a PIN for the SoC archi... » read more

Tech Talk: SoC Protocol Debug

By Ed Sperling - 24 Sep, 2015 - Comments: 0

Bernie DeLay, group director for verification IP R&D at Synopsys, talks about what goes wrong in complex SoCs, how so-called standard pieces play together, and where are the gotchas in re-use. [youtube vid=AaY_AmdjUpo] » read more

SoC Verification Made Easy With Aldec HES-DVM

By Aldec - 23 Sep, 2015 - Comments: 0

As designs grow larger, the time spent verifying a project is growing longer as well. As a solution, some companies are trying to ‘shift-left’ their schedules. Verification via software simulators is not fast enough for large System-on-Chip (SoC) design projects, therefore one option is to use an FPGA emulator to speed up the design process. But what happens when a bug occurs? This document... » read more

ESL: 20 Years Old, 10 To Go

By Brian Bailey - 23 Sep, 2015 - Comments: 2

It is a common perception that the rate of technology adoption accelerates. In 1873, the telephone was invented and, after 46 years, it had been adopted by one-quarter of the U.S. population. Television, invented in 1926 took 26 years. The PC in 1975 took just 16 years. It took only 7 years after the introduction of the Internet in 1991 before it was seeing significant levels of adoption. So... » read more

Tech Talk: Power Emulation

By Ed Sperling - 10 Sep, 2015 - Comments: 0

Jean-Marie Brunet, marketing director for Mentor Graphics' Emulation Division, talks about why hardware-assisted verification is now required for power and where it works best. [youtube vid=Mb63cbjbZ_I] » read more

Making Hardware Design More Agile

By Ed Sperling - 31 Aug, 2015 - Comments: 1

Semiconductor engineering sat down to whether changes are needed in hardware design methodology, with Philip Gutierrez, ASIC/FPGA design manager in [getentity id="22306" comment="IBM"]'s FlashSystems Storage Group; Dennis Brophy, director of strategic business development at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"]; Frank Schirrmeister, group director for product marketing of the System ... » read more

DVFS On The Sidelines

By Brian Bailey - 13 Aug, 2015 - Comments: 2

Power reduction is one of the most important aspects of chip design these days, but not all power reduction techniques are used equally. Some that were once important are fading and dynamic voltage, and frequency scaling (DVFS) is one of them. What's changed, and will we see a resurgence in the future? What is it? DVFS has physics powerfully in its favor. As Vinod Viswanath, director of res... » read more

2.5D Creeps Into SoC Designs

By Ed Sperling - 13 Aug, 2015 - Comments: 0

A decade ago top chipmakers predicted that the next frontier for SoC architectures would be the z axis, adding a third dimension to improve throughput and performance, reduce congestion around memories, and reduce the amount of energy needed to drive signals. The obvious market for this was applications processors for mobile devices, and the first companies to jump on the stacked die bandwag... » read more

Poised For Aspect-Oriented Design?

By Brian Bailey - 13 Aug, 2015 - Comments: 8

In 1992, [getperson id=" 11046 " comment="Yoav Hollander"] had the idea to take a software programming discipline called aspect-oriented programming (AOP) and apply it to the verification of hardware. Those concepts were incorporated into the [gettech id="31021" t_name="e"] language and [getentity id="22068" e_name="Verisity"] was formed to commercialize it. Hollander had seen that using obj... » read more

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Knowledge Centers
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