The “Virtual” Year Recap


There is something compelling about arriving at the end of the year and reviewing what happened during the year. In principle nothing is really different and a date is just a date, but we humans created this sense of time through well-defined boundaries of hours, days, months and years and a year-end boundary is an especially big deal. At the end of the year, we like to reflect upon the past ye... » 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

Scaling Automated Software Testing With Virtualizer Development Kits


In this whitepaper we will discuss how simulation-based Virtualizer Development Kits (VDKs) enable software to be tested in a system context much earlier, bridging the gap with unit and integration testing. Moreover, we will discuss how VDKs offer a more scalable solution as they consist of simulation models and hence alleviate the dependency on hardware labs. To read more, click here. » read more

Who’s Profiting From Complexity


Tool vendors' profits increasingly are coming from segments that performed relatively poorly in the past, reflecting both a rise in complexity in designing chips and big improvements in the tools themselves. The impacts of power, memory congestion, advanced-node effects such as process variation, [getkc id="160" kc_name="electromigration"] and RC delay in [getkc id="36" kc_name="interconnect... » read more

New Approaches To Low Power Design


While Moore's Law continues to drive feature size reduction and complexity, a whole separate part of the industry is growing up around vertical markets in the IoT. While these two worlds may be different in many respects, they share one thing in common—low power design is critical to success. How engineering teams minimize power in each of these markets, and even within the same market, ca... » read more

The Human Bottleneck


The history of semiconductor technology can be neatly summed up as a race to eliminate the next bottleneck. This is often done one process node at a time across an increasingly complex ecosystem. And it usually involves a high level of frustration, because the biggest problems stem from areas where engineering teams generally can't do anything about them. Concerns over the years have ranged ... » read more

How To Choose A Processor


Choosing a processor might seem straightforward at first glance, but like many engineering challenges it's harder than it looks. When is a CPU better than a GPU, MCU, DSP or other type of processor? And for what design—or part of a design? For decades, the CPU has been the default choice. “It is deliberately designed to be pretty efficient at all tasks, is straightforward to program, ... » read more

Scare Of The Month: Whitebox Cryptography


A debate has been raging for some time about whether hardware is more secure than software. This story should provide plenty of fuel for debate. A few years ago, something called White Box Cryptography (WBC) was developed. This is a rather novel approach that attempts to implement cryptography algorithms in software, rather than hardware. The idea is to keep the cryptographic assets secure a... » read more

Hardware Models For Software


Shift left, while a relatively new term, has become important in all parts of the SoC design flow, but its impacts are wide ranging and many still ill defined. It basically means that tasks have to be started earlier than in the past because more accuracy is required from tasks that are further down in the flow in order to make better predictions. It also implies that more steps are performed c... » read more

Software Is Eating the World


In this blog I have been discussing the increasing impact of software on many aspects of our lives. In the past we mostly interacted with a software-driven device when we sat in front of a desktop computer. We now carry a device with us that is as powerful as a computer. Our cars track our moves and try to pre-empt an accident by warning us about rapidly approaching obstacles, or prevent our ti... » read more

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