Verification Tools Straining To Keep Up

By Brian Bailey - 01 Jul, 2024 - Comments: 0

Verification engineers are the unsung heroes of the semiconductor industry, but they are at a breaking point and desperately in need of modern tools and flows to deal with the rapidly increasing pressures. Verification is no longer just about ensuring that functionality is faithfully represented in an implementation. That alone is an insolvable task, but verification has taken on many new re... » read more

What Happened To Portable Stimulus?

By Brian Bailey - 28 Sep, 2023 - Comments: 0

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

Universal Verification Methodology Coverage For Bluespec RISC-V Cores

By Synopsys - 27 Sep, 2023 - Comments: 0

Attempting to achieve complete RISC-V verification requires multiple methodologies, one of which is coverage driven simulation based on UVM constrained random methods and complaint with the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) standard. This whitepaper explains the basics of UVM functional coverage for RISC-V cores using the Google RISCV-DV open-source project, Synopsys verification solu... » read more

Understanding UVM Coverage For RISC-V Processor Designs

By Synopsys - 13 Sep, 2023 - Comments: 0

Attempting to achieve complete RISC-V verification requires multiple methodologies employing a wide range of relevant tools, including: • Coverage driven simulation based on UVM constrained random methods and compliant with the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) standard • Static and formal property verification • Equivalence checking • Emulation and FPGA based verific... » read more

Extending The Benefits Of UVM To Include AMS: An Update On Accellera’s UVM-AMS Standard Development

By Tom Fitzpatrick - 04 Oct, 2022 - Comments: 0

By Tom Fitzpatrick and Peter Grove SoC teams can be divided up into design and verification groups. For digital designs, the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM), initially developed by Accellera and now standardized as IEEE 1800.2, has been the industry standard for the past decade. Since most SoC designs also have analog and mixed-signal IP blocks, it would be ideal for verification en... » read more

Efficient Verification Of Mixed-Signal Series IP Using UVM

By Cadence - 21 Sep, 2022 - Comments: 0

Interface IP are an integral part of systems-on-chips (SoC) that include mobile, automotive, or networking applications and are primarily used for transmitting data over a physical medium between a host and device. The mixed-signal nature of the IP makes verification a challenging task, requiring special considerations for digital and analog sections. This paper describes a robust mixed-signal ... » read more

The Next Incarnation Of EDA

By Brian Bailey - 25 Aug, 2022 - Comments: 0

The EDA industry has incrementally addressed issues as they arise in the design of electronic systems, but is there about to be a disruption? Academia is certainly seeing that as a possibility, but not all of them see it happening for the same reason. The academic community questioned the future of EDA at the recent Design Automation Conference. Rather than EDA as we know it going away, they... » read more

Verification Scorecard: How Well Is The Industry Doing?

By Brian Bailey - 25 Aug, 2022 - Comments: 0

Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss how well verification tools and methodologies have been keeping up with demand, with Larry Lapides, vice president of sales for Imperas Software; Mike Thompson, director of engineering for the verification task group at OpenHW; Paul Graykowski, technical marketing manager for Arteris IP; Shantanu Ganguly, vice president of product marketing at Caden... » read more

ML And UVM Share Same Flaws

By Brian Bailey - 28 Jul, 2022 - Comments: 1

A number of people must be scratching their heads over what UVM and machine learning (ML) have in common, such that they can be described as having the same flaws. In both cases, it is a flaw of omission in some sense. Let's start with ML, and in particular, object recognition. A decade ago, Alexnet, coupled with GPUs, managed to beat all of the object detection systems that relied on tradit... » read more

High-Level Synthesis For RISC-V

By Brian Bailey - 28 Oct, 2021 - Comments: 2

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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Knowledge Centers
Entities, people and technologies explored

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3.5D: The Great Compromise

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Memory Fundamentals For Engineers

eBook: Nearly everything you need to know about memory, including detailed explanations of the different types of memory; how and where these are used today; what's changing, which memories are successful and which ones might be in the future; and the limitations of each memory type.

by The SE Staff

What Comes After HBM For Chiplets

The standard for high-bandwidth memory limits design freedom at many levels, but that is required for interoperability. What freedoms can be taken from other functions to make chiplets possible?