Software Debug Gets Tricky


By Ann Steffora Mutschler As designs continue to grow in size and complexity, that complexity has led to an increasing number of processing cores. Additional cores, in turn, allow for additional software to be run on those cores, and debugging the software becomes critical. Traditionally, emulation has played a significant role in verifying that software against RTL code, and continues to d... » read more

Dealing With New Bottlenecks


By Ed Sperling While the number of options for improving efficiency and performance in designs continues to increase, the number of challenges in getting chips at advanced process nodes out the door is increasing, too. Thinner wires, routing congestion, more power domains, IP integration and lithography issues are conspiring to make design much more difficult than in the past. So why aren�... » read more

The Controversial Spec


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Design sophistication and complexity has made it increasingly difficult to fully specify the expected behavior of a block in an SoC, but this is necessary for design and verification teams. How do you write a “good” and “complete” specification of functionality? It turns out that the discussion of defining what a good and complete specification is and how t... » read more

MacBook Air 2013: Power Efficient To The Core(s)


By Cary Chin Last month, we looked at the initial announcement at WWDC of the latest MacBook Air laptops. These new machines are physically nearly identical to their predecessors, boast negligible performance improvements (and even performance degradation in some instances), cost about the same, and yet in my view are perhaps the most revolutionary products since the MacBook Air line was reinv... » read more

The Rise Of Semiconductor IP Subsystems


The semiconductor IP (SIP) market arose when SIP vendors created IP functions that mirrored those found in the discrete semiconductor market and made those functions available to SoC designers in the form of hard or soft SIP blocks. As the SoC and SIP markets evolved, it was a natural evolution that many discrete SIP functions be converged into larger blocks that mimic system-level functions (i... » read more

Blog Review: July 10


By Ed Sperling Mentor’s Harry Foster rolls out part four of his epic functional verification study, this one on design and verification reuse. If you work in the verification world, pounce. Cadence’s Brian Fuller looks back over a quarter century of technology—and what the average salary of a hardware design engineer will be in a 15 years: $499,000. But what will a cup of coffee cost?... » read more

Experts At The Table: Changes In The Ecosystem


By Ed Sperling Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down with Michael Buehler-Garcia, director of design solutions marketing at Mentor Graphics; Seow Yin Lim, group director for marketing at Cadence; Kevin Kranen, director of strategic alliances at Synopsys, and Tom Quan, director at TSMC. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SMD: How are chipmakers working with the rest ... » read more

Experts At The Table: Changes In The Ecosystem


By Ed Sperling Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down with Michael Buehler-Garcia, director of design solutions marketing at Mentor Graphics; Seow Yin Lim, group director for marketing at Cadence; Kevin Kranen, director of strategic alliances at Synopsys, and Tom Quan, director at TSMC. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SMD: How are chipmakers working with the rest... » read more

Experts At The Table: Performance Analysis


Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down with Ravi Kalyanaraman, senior verification manager for the digital entertainment business unit at Marvell; William Orme, strategic marketing manager for ARM’s System IP and Processor Division; Steve Brown, product marketing and business development director for the systems and software group at Cadence; Johannes Stahl director of product market... » read more

Experts At The Table: SoC Prototyping


By Ann Steffora Mutschler System-Level Design sat down to discuss SoC prototyping with Hillel Miller, pre-silicon verification/emulation manager at Freescale Semiconductor; Frank Schirrmeister, group director, product marketing, for the system development suite at Cadence; and Mick Posner, director of product marketing at Synopsys. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SLD: How... » read more

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