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

The Power Problem


For the past few years, EDA companies have been warning chipmakers that power will become the biggest issue they face at future nodes. They were right. While it may not be the only big problem—after all, the number of issues at each new tick of Moore’s Law is growing—power is certainly one of the most challenging and by far the most pervasive. In fact, the warnings about just how perni... » 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

Experts At The Table: The Trouble With Low-Power Verification


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss low-power verification with Leah Clark, associate technical director at Broadcom; Erich Marschner, product marketing manager at Mentor Graphics; Cary Chin, director of marketing for low-power solutions at Synopsys; and Venki Venkatesh, senior director of engineering at Atrenta. What follows are excerpts of that conversat... » read more

Experts At The Table: Verification Strategies


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down to discuss verification strategies and changes with Harry Foster, chief verification scientist at Mentor Graphics: Janick Bergeron, verification fellow at Synopsys; Pranav Ashar, CTO at Real Intent; Tom Anderson, vice president of marketing at Breker Verification Systems; and Raik Brinkmann, president and CEO of OneSpin Solutions. What follows are e... » read more

Executive Briefing: Wally Rhines


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design, as part of its ongoing executive briefing series, sat down with Wally Rhines, Mentor Graphics' chairman and CEO, to talk about future problems, opportunities, and the gray areas that could go either way. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SLD: Is the amount of time spent on verification increasing? Rhines: It depends on how you define who s... » read more

The Smartphonification Of Things


By Ann Steffora Mutschler The term, ‘Internet of Things,’ was first coined more than a decade ago by technology visionary Kevin Ashton but has slowly trickled down to the world of chip design and is now mentioned constantly in conversation. The reason is simple: System-level design tools are getting sophisticated enough to handle the intricacies required by devices in an Internet of ... » read more

Continuous, Connected And Concurrent Verification


By Ed Sperling It’s a wonder that any electronic system works as intended, or that it continues to work months or years after it is sold. The reason: SoCs have become so complex that no verification coverage model is sufficient anymore, no methodology covers every aspect of verification, and no single tool or even collection of tools can catch every bug or prevent them from being there in th... » read more

Experts At The Table: Verification Strategies


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down to discuss verification strategies and changes with Harry Foster, chief verification scientist at Mentor Graphics: Janick Bergeron, verification fellow at Synopsys; Pranav Ashar, CTO at Real Intent; Tom Anderson, vice president of marketing at Breker Verification Systems; and Raik Brinkmann, president and CEO of OneSpin Solutions. What follows are e... » read more

Observation Post


By Pranav Ashar After attending the 2013 Design and Verification Conference (DVCon) in San Jose, Calif., I have compiled notes as both an observer and a panel participant. Here are my observations: Wally Rhines, CEO of Mentor Graphics, gave the keynote presentation: Accelerating EDA Innovation Through SoC Design Methodology Convergence. Logically and effectively he made the case that SoC in... » read more

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