Intelligent System Design

By Cadence - 02 Sep, 2020 - Comments: 0

Electronics technology is proliferating to new, creative applications and appearing in our everyday lives. To compete, system companies are increasingly designing their own semiconductor chips, and semiconductor companies are delivering software stacks, to enable substantial differentiation of their products. This trend started in mobile devices and is now moving into cloud computing, automotiv... » read more

Applications, Ecosystems And System Complexity Will Be Key Verification Drivers For 2020

By Frank Schirrmeister - 19 Dec, 2019 - Comments: 0

In my predictions blog last year, I focused on verification throughput and its expected growth in 2019. The four areas I predicted we’d see growth in during 2019 were scalable performance, unbound capacity including cloud enablement, smart bug hunting and multi-level abstractions. In 2018, the five key verification drivers that I identified were security, safety, application specificity, proc... » read more

Does System Design Still Need Abstraction?

By Frank Schirrmeister - 24 Oct, 2019 - Comments: 0

About 15 years ago, the assumption in the EDA industry was that system design would be inevitable. The transition from gate-level design to a new entry point at the register transfer level (RTL) seemed complete with logic synthesis becoming well-adopted. The next step seemed to be so obvious at the time: High-level synthesis (HLS) and transaction-based development beyond RTL—also taking into ... » read more

Toward A Lingua Franca For Intelligent System Design

By Frank Schirrmeister - 26 Sep, 2019 - Comments: 1

As the EDA industry is moving up further and further towards the intelligent design of full systems, this year’s Forum on Design Languages (FDL) offered a great update on the status quo with regard to where languages fit into this transition. It looks like the next step will not be one universal language as previously targeted back when there was a flurry of introductions of new programming m... » read more

Are Digital Twins Something For EDA To Pursue?

By Ann Mutschler - 07 Aug, 2019 - Comments: 0

‘Digital Twins’ are one of the new, fashionable key concepts for system developers, but do they fit with EDA? How many different types of engines do these twins run on – abstract simulation, signal-based RTL simulation, emulation, prototyping, actual silicon? What should the use models be called for digital twinning – like reproduction of bugs from silicon in emulation? Or optimizing th... » read more

Using Memory Differently

By Ann Mutschler - 31 Jan, 2019 - Comments: 0

Chip architects are beginning to rewrite the rules on how to choose, configure and use different types of memory, particularly for chips with AI and some advanced SoCs. Chipmakers now have a number of options and tradeoffs to consider when choosing memories, based on factors such as the application and the characteristics of the memory workload, because different memory types work better tha... » read more

DAC 2018: System Design, Cloud And Machine Learning

By Frank Schirrmeister - 28 Jun, 2018 - Comments: 0

This marks the 10th DAC that I have covered as a blogger. At DAC 2008 in Anaheim, the industry had just come together behind the SystemC TLM 2.0 standard to enable virtual platforms, finally getting to model interoperability. System design is the common thread that is also present in this year’s DAC in 2018 in San Francisco. But a lot has changed. Big data analytics, artificial intelligence a... » read more

Emulating Systems Of Systems

By Frank Schirrmeister - 27 Jul, 2017 - Comments: 0

System design is all the craze these days. I have been in notably more discussions recently about how one can verify systems of systems. Does an airplane or a car lend itself to an array of emulators? Are multiple abstractions needed? How can design teams span electrical, mechanical, and thermal—as well as analog and digital—effects? Do companies need to re-organize to deal with system desi... » read more

Executive Insight: Lip-Bu Tan

By Ed Sperling - 06 Jun, 2016 - Comments: 0

Lip-Bu Tan, president and CEO of Cadence, opens up on the next big things, what will drive them, and what will change to make that happen. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What are the biggest changes in the semiconductor industry over the past year? Tan: The whole system approach to designing hardware and software is really happening now. It will continue to expand fr... » read more

Automating System Design

By Ann Mutschler - 02 May, 2016 - Comments: 1

Change is underway in the chip design world, creating opportunities and challenges that reach far beyond questions about whether Moore’s Law is slowing or stopping. Never before in the history of semiconductors has design been so complex and sophisticated, and never has it touched so many lives in so many interesting ways. This is all happening as a result of the chip’s enabling role in ... » read more

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Shift Left Is The Tip Of The Iceberg

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