Experts At The Table: Debug


By Ed Sperling Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Galen Blake, senior verification engineer at Altera; Warren Stapleton, senior fellow at Advanced Micro Devices; Stephen Bailey, director of solutions marketing at Mentor Graphics; Michael Sanie, senior director of verification marketing at Synopsys. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What are the big issues with debug? ... » read more

What Can Go Wrong?


It’s no surprise that most corporate system-on-chip (SoC) design teams are dispersed throughout the world, with different functional teams often located in different countries and continents. For example, we have many customers whose SoC architecture is defined in the United States, but subsystems such as graphics and signal processing are designed elsewhere. Companies choose this approach in... » read more

Experts At The Table: Next-Generation IP Landscape


By Ann Steffora Mutschler System-Level Design sat down to discuss predictions about the next generation design IP landscape with Robert Aitken, R&D fellow at ARM; Laurent Moll, chief technical officer at Arteris; Susan Peterson, group director, product marketing for verification IP & memory models in the system & software realization group at Cadence; and John Koeter, vice preside... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 4


By Ed Sperling Cadence’s Brian Fuller looks at the opportunity for EDA in the cloud and where it’s most likely to gain traction. How about the PCB? Synopsys’ Mick Posner has moved beyond broad-based design ecosystems. He’s now reaching out to local neighborhoods with FPGA prototypes. Sounds like quality family time. Mentor’s Colin Walls concedes that all non-trivial software ... » read more

The Case For Extensible Processors


By Neil Hand In a previous post I talked about how intelligent subsystems are going to impact overall system design. Because many more design teams are going to be required to implement complex processing power into there subsystems, I thought it time to expand on that topic and talk a little about options available to add that intelligence. One size does not fit all The traditional approa... » read more

Software Impact Grows


By Ed Sperling As the number of processors and processor cores increase in SoC, so does the amount of software. But unlike hardware, which grows linearly, software frequently grows exponentially. The great advantage of software is configurability—both before and after tapeout—yet it adds many more possible permutations and interactions that need to be worked out. And unlike the old PC m... » read more

Simple Concepts Can Lead To Big Improvements


By Tom De Schutter As I am just back from vacation, it is an ideal time to reflect on where we are with virtual prototyping and VDKs (Virtualizer Development Kits). For more than a year now we have been developing reference VDKs based on ARM’s Versatile Express board, and it has really made a difference in how we engage with customers. Although we always had demos, which were similar to t... » read more

Completing System Design Flows With Emulation


By Frank Schirrmeister Earlier this week, I participated with Mike Gianfagna (Atrenta) and our own Jason Andrews in a webinar hosted by Gary Smith called, “ESL - Are You Ready?” One of the very interesting discussion topics was how hardware-assisted verification has become the missing element in complementing different execution engines to enable software development and verification in de... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 21


By Ed Sperling Mentor’s Michael Ford recalls the worst meetings in the world—ones that involve materials in the manufacturing process. Unfortunately there were a lot of them, so they were more like working in a recurring nightmare. Paging Freddie Krueger. Synopsys’ Karen Bartleson talks with Angisys CEO Anupam Bakshi about why EDA companies need to collaborate, and what’s the risk ... » read more

Experts At The Table: Who Pays For Low Power?


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss the cost of low power with Fadi Gebara, research staff member for IBM’s Austin Research Lab; David Pan, associate professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Texas; Aveek Sarkar, vice president of product engineering and support at Apache Design; and Tim Whitfield, director ... » read more

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