Using SystemC TLM Modeling To Solve AI Data Movement Challenges


In AI silicon, the performance numbers tell only part of the story. Marketing claims often highlight headline metrics such as trillions of operations per second, tensor throughput, matrix dimensions, and accelerator density. But engineers building these systems understand the harder truth. Compute performance matters only when data arrives at the right rate, with the right latency, and without ... » read more

Creating Agentic EDA Methodologies


Key takeaways Agentic methodologies need to be able to reason across multiple data formats and abstractions. It is not clear how much data from previous designs is useful in new designs. Standards may help, but the lack of them may only impact cost. The relationship between tools and methodologies is bidirectional. Tools enable methodologies, and methodologies are dependent ... » read more

Ensure Equivalence Of Synthesizable C++/SystemC Designs Against Generated/Handwritten RTL


High-level synthesis (HLS) is a design flow in which design intent is described at a higher level of abstraction than RTL, such as in SystemC/C++ or MATLAB. HLS tools are expected to synthesize this code to RTL, which can be input to the traditional RTL downstream flow (RTL/GDS). Formally checking generated RTL can be difficult to analyze, as errors cannot be correlated to the HLS source code. ... » read more

Framework To Control And Interact With SystemC-based Virtual Platforms Using The FMI (RWTH Aachen Univ. et al.)


A new technical paper titled "FMI Meets SystemC: A Framework for Cross-Tool Virtual Prototyping" was published by researchers at RWTH Aachen University, MachineWare and tracetronic. Excerpt "As systems become more complex, the demand for thorough testing and virtual prototyping grows. To simulate whole systems, multiple tools are usually needed to cover different parts. These parts include ... » read more

SystemC-based Power Side-Channel Attacks Against AI Accelerators (Univ. of Lubeck)


A new technical paper titled "SystemC Model of Power Side-Channel Attacks Against AI Accelerators: Superstition or not?" was published by researchers at Germany's University of Lubeck. Abstract "As training artificial intelligence (AI) models is a lengthy and hence costly process, leakage of such a model's internal parameters is highly undesirable. In the case of AI accelerators, side-chann... » read more

What Happened To Portable Stimulus?


In June 2018, Accellera released the initial version of the Portable Test and Stimulus Standard (PSS), a new verification language that was slated to be the first new abstraction defined within EDA for a couple of decades. So what happened to it? Apart from a few updates at DVCon, there appears to be little talk about it today. However, the industry has its head down trying to make it work, ... » read more

Not All There: Heterogeneous Multiprocessor Design Tools


The design, implementation, and programming of multicore heterogeneous systems is becoming more common, often driven by the software workloads, but the tooling to help optimize the processors, interconnect, and memory are disjointed. Over the past few years, many tools have emerged that help with the definition and implementation of a single processor, optimized for a given set of software. ... » read more

RISC-V Virtual Prototype


A new technical paper titled "Advanced Embedded System Modeling and Simulation in an Open Source RISC-V Virtual Prototype" was published by researchers at DFKI GmbH and University of Bremen. Abstract "RISC-V is a modern Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) that, by its open nature in combination with a clean and modular design, has enormous potential to become a game changer in the Internet o... » read more

Customizing Processors


The design, verification, and implementation of a processor is the core competence of some companies, but others just want to whip up a small processor as quickly and cheaply as possible. What tools and options exist? Processors range from very small, simple cores that are deeply embedded into products to those operating at the highest possible clock speeds and throughputs in data centers. I... » read more

High-Level Synthesis For RISC-V


High-quality RISC-V implementations are becoming more numerous, but it is the extensibility of the architecture that is driving a lot of design activity. The challenge is designing and implementing custom processors without having to re-implement them every time at the register transfer level (RTL). There are two types of high-level synthesis (HLS) that need to be considered. The first is ge... » read more

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