Multicore Debug Evolves To The System-Level


The proliferation and expansion of multicore architectures is making debug much more difficult and time-consuming, which in turn is increasing demand for more comprehensive system-level tools and approaches. Multicore/multiprocessor designs are the most complex devices to debug. More interactions and interdependencies between cores mean more things possibly can go wrong. In fact, so many pro... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools, Cloud, IP Valtrix Systems updated its STING design verification tool for RISC-V based CPU and SoC implementations. Version 1.9.0 adds support to verify recent changes to the RISC-V user and privilege specifications, including draft versions of the vector and bit manipulation standard extensions. Preliminary support for the draft version of the RISC-V hypervisor extension has also been a... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


RISC-V RISC-V International CEO Calista Redmond provided an update on the state of the community during the annual RISC-V Summit: “RISC-V has had an incredible year of growth and momentum. This year, our technical community has grown 66 percent to more than 2,300 individuals in our more than 50 technical and special interest groups. We’re seeing increased market momentum of RISC-V cores, S... » read more

Forward And Backward Compatibility In IC Designs


Future-proofing of designs is becoming more difficult due to the accelerating pace of innovation in architectures, end markets, and technologies such as AI and machine learning. Traditional approaches for maintaining market share and analyzing what should be in the next rev of a product are falling by the wayside. They are being replaced by best-guesses about market trends and a need to bala... » read more

Speeding Up AI With Vector Instructions


A search is underway across the industry to find the best way to speed up machine learning applications, and optimizing hardware for vector instructions is gaining traction as a key element in that effort. Vector instructions are a class of instructions that enable parallel processing of data sets. An entire array of integers or floating point numbers is processed in a single operation, elim... » read more

RISC-V: Will There Be Other Open-Source Cores?


Part 3: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the business and technology landscape for RISC-V with Zdenek Prikryl, CTO of Codasip; Helena Handschuh, a Rambus Security Technologies fellow; Louie De Luna, director of marketing at Aldec; Shubhodeep Roy Choudhury, CEO of Valtrix Systems; and Bipul Talukdar, North America director of applications engineering at SmartDV. What follows are exc... » read more

RISC-V: What’s Missing And Who’s Competing


Part 2: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the business and technology landscape for RISC-V with Zdenek Prikryl, CTO of Codasip; Helena Handschuh, a Rambus Security Technologies fellow; Louie De Luna, director of marketing at Aldec; Shubhodeep Roy Choudhury, CEO of Valtrix Systems; and Bipul Talukdar, North America director of applications engineering at SmartDV. What follows are exc... » read more

Components For Open-Source Verification


Defining an open-source verification methodology is a lot more difficult than just developing an open-source simulator. This is the reality facing open-source hardware such as RISC-V. Some people may be asking for the corresponding open-source verification, but that is a much tougher problem — and it is not going to be solved in the short term. Part one examined the reasons why open-source... » read more

Verifying PULPino RISCY Core For A Google Accelerator With STING


Authors: Shubhodeep Roy Choudhury1, Shajid Thiruvathodi2, Vaidyanathan Seetharaman3, Matt Cockrell4, Jon Michelson5, Jason Redgrave6 Valtrix Technologies Private Limited, Bangalore, INDIA1, 2 Google Inc., Mountain View, USA3,4,5,6 Abstract: — Google uses the PULPino RISC-V core RISCY as a job scheduling and dispatch mechanism for a hardware accelerator (similar to a GPU controller). This... » read more

Universal Verification Methodology Running Out Of Steam


For the past decade or so, the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) has been the de facto verification methodology supported by the entire EDA industry. But as chips become more heterogeneous, more complex, and significantly larger, UVM is running out of steam. Consensus is building that some fundamental changes are required, moving tools up a level of abstraction and making them more ag... » read more

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