The Four Pillars Of Hyperscale Computing


In his keynote at CadenceLIVE Americas 2020, Facebook’s Vijay Rao, director, Technology and Strategy, described the four core elements the team considers when designing their data centers—compute, storage, memory, and networking. Wait a minute. Facebook? How did we get here? Wasn’t EDA supposed to be focused on chip design? As indicated in a previous blog, electronic value chains are defi... » read more

5G Needs Cohesive Pre- And Post-Silicon Verification


While 5G doesn’t start from a clean slate, it does make significant changes to the 4G architecture. These changes mean that the ecosystem from chips to operators is evolving, giving opportunities to more companies to engage in this growing market. Realignment in fronthaul, midhaul and backhaul In particular, the radio access network (RAN) has been redefined as Cloud RAN (sometimes called ... » read more

Designing Networking Chips


Susheel Tadikonda, vice president of networking and storage at Synopsys, talks about what’s changed in the way networking chips are being designed to deal with a massive increase in data. One of those shifts involves software-defined networking, where the greatest complexity resides in the software. That also has a big impact on the entire design flow, from pre-silicon to post-silicon. htt... » read more

Virtual PCIe Delivers A “Shift Left” In Software-Defined Networking Emulation


This paper reviews both SW and UVM Vector Based Verification (VBV) methodologies and Advanced Vector Based Verification (AVBV) that uses Software Defined Networking (SDN) HW to service PCIe transactions to the DUT. When deploying VBV methodologies, using the Veloce Transactor Library (VTL) family of components is most appropriate for UVM, C++ and SDK testbench methodologies. We explore how V... » read more

Custom Hardware Thriving


In the early days of the IoT, predictions about the commoditization of hardware and the end of customized hardware were everywhere. Several years later, those predictions are being proven wrong. Off-the-shelf components have not replaced customized hardware, and software has not dictated all designs. In fact, in many cases the exact opposite has happened. And where software does play an elev... » read more