A Complete System-Level Security Verification Methodology


Hardware is at the root of all digital systems, and security must be considered during the system-on-chip (SoC) design and verification process. Verifying the security of an SoC design is challenging because of time to market pressure and resource constraints. Resources allocated to the already time-consuming task of functional verification must be diverted to security verification, which requi... » read more

Verification Facing Unique Inflection Point


The Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon) attracted more than 1,100 people to San Jose last week, just slightly less than last year. While a lot of focus, and most of the glory, goes to design within semiconductor companies, it is verification where most of the advancements are happening and thus the bigger focus for DVCon. The rate of change in verification and the producti... » read more

Executive Insight: Adnan Hamid


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Adnan Hamid, founder and CEO of Breker Verification Systems. Breker was founded in 2003 and has been concentrating on the creation of verification methodologies for multiprocessor SoCs using graph-based entry methods – something that became a hot topic at DVCon 2014 after Mentor Graphics decided to donate its format to Accellera for standardization. ... » read more

Biggest Verification Mistakes


[getkc id="81" kc_name="SoC"]s today have more processors and more embedded software than ever, including drivers and middleware just to get the hardware working. This, in turn, requires more and better [getkc id="10" kc_name="verification"]. Add to the challenge the fact that there is no one way to do verification and it is easy to comprehend how critical it is to for hardware and software tea... » read more

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: The amount of IP is increasing and i... » read more

Verifying At The System Level


By Ed Sperling Verification has always been the problem child of SoC design. It requires the most engineering resources, the largest block of time and the biggest budget in the design process. And at each new process node the problem gets bigger, in part because there is more stuff on each die—transistors, memory, interconnects, I/O, functionality—and in part because chipmakers are being c... » read more