The Problem With EDA Standards


In the EDA industry, does standard mean the same as it does in most industries? The Free Dictionary defines it as: Something, such as a practice or a product, that is widely recognized or employed, especially because of its excellence. In the EDA industry, a standards body is the place where EDA companies and customers come together to try and bring about convergence, often in a new or emerging... » read more

IP-XACT Becoming More Useful


Accellera created analog/mixed signal extensions to the IEEE IP-XACT standard, and the standards group will recommend an update to the overall standard later this year to make it more useful for IP integration. IP-XACT has been considered a great idea since its introduction in 2009 because it allows IP makers to add metadata to their IP—information needed to integrate it into complex desig... » read more

Experts At The Table: Low-Power Verification


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss power format changes with Sushma Hoonavera-Prasad, design engineer in Broadcom’s mobile platform group; John Biggs, consultant engineer for R&D and co-founder of ARM; Erich Marschner, product marketing manager at Mentor Graphics; Qi Wang, technical marketing group director at Cadence; and Jeffrey Lee, corporate ap... » read more

Delicate Balance


By Joe Hupcey III It’s not surprising that power optimization is a critical part of today’s complex designs. Unbeknownst to most consumers is an underlying methodology that every design engineer must follow to make sure a consumer device meets the power requirements of the consumer—even if the consumer doesn’t realize they’re demanding it. The situation in industrial products, suc... » read more

Experts At The Table: Low-Power Verification


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss power format changes with Sushma Hoonavera-Prasad, design engineer in Broadcom’s mobile platform group; John Biggs, consultant engineer for R&D and co-founder of ARM; Erich Marschner, product marketing manager at Mentor Graphics; Qi Wang, technical marketing group director at Cadence; and Jeffrey Lee, corporate app... » read more

A Tale Of Two Standards


By Ed Sperling It could well be one of the strangest developments in standards history. Two competing standards for power formats were rolled out in the middle of the last decade and aside from a few cries of foul they fell below the radar screen of most chip designers and architects for a half-dozen years. Fast forward to the present and the Common Power Format (CPF) and Unified Power Form... » read more

What’s Missing In Low-Power Verification


By Ed Sperling Ask two engineers what low-power verification is and you’ll likely get the same checklist that includes confidence in the overall design, good coverage, a long list of corner cases, and other items in a checklist. Ask them how to reach that goal you’ll almost certainly get different answers—or maybe no answers at all. Power has emerged as a ubiquitous concern in design,... » read more

Optimizing IP For Power


By Ed Sperling As the amount of commercial IP in an SoC increases, the entire bill of materials is coming under increasing scrutiny because of a new concern—power. Commercial IP, after all, is largely a collection of black-box solutions to speed up the time it takes to bring a chip to market, and frequently to improve the quality, but the cumulative impact on the system power budget has neve... » read more

Dealing With The Data Glut


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Tools like emulation and simulation are an absolute necessity to design and verify today’s complex SoCs, but what happens when you want to do power analysis and the file sizes are too massive for the emulator to handle? Even with an emulator a five-minute mobile phone call could take three months. Understandably, this issue is causing pain to many design teams... » read more

Best Practices


By Tom Fitzpatrick Active power control management for low-power designs has become a hot topic, especially with the latest update to the Unified Power Format standard. Version 2.1 was approved by IEEE on March 6, 2013. UPF gives the ability to specify power control for different parts of a design, separate from the RTL itself. The advent of low-power design has greatly increased the comple... » read more

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