Greener Design Verification


Chip designs are optimized for lower cost, better performance, or lower power. The same cannot be said about verification, where today very little effort is spent on reducing execution cost, run time, or power consumption. Admittedly, one is a per unit cost while the other is a development cost, but could the industry be doing more to make development greener? It can take days for regression... » read more

Dependable Verification Is The Foundation ICs Require


As our world becomes increasingly high-tech, it is easy to lose sight of the little things that make all of our fancy gadgets achieve optimal performance. The one thread that enables you to get all of the benefits of a new laptop, tablet, smartphone, or your automobile’s digital dashboard and connects the components that ensure best performance is the integrated circuit (IC). For as breath... » read more

FortifyIQ: Hardware Security Verification


What’s the best way to protect against side-channel attacks? FortifyIQ believes the answer lies at least partly in the verification process. Side channel and fault-injection attacks have been garnering more attention lately as hackers continue to branch out from software to a combination of software and hardware. This is especially worrying for safety-critical applications, such as automot... » read more

Bug Hunt! Spiraling In On Formal Coverage Closure


By Mark Eslinger and Jin Hou Many companies have used formal verification to verify complex SoCs and safety-critical designs. Using formal verification to confirm design functionalities and to uncover functional bugs is emerging as an efficient verification approach. Although formal verification will not handle the complexity of a design at the SoC level, it is an efficient tool to verify th... » read more

Traceability, Unfamiliar But Critical


Many understand that traceability is a popular concept. Still, understanding traceability in detail is more challenging, especially in how it connects to familiar objectives in the semiconductor design space. A simple way to understand is this: When a customer (call them C) asks a semiconductor supplier (call them S) to build a device to meet a system objective, they provide S with specificatio... » read more

Domain-Specific Design Drives EDA Changes


The chip design ecosystem is beginning to pivot toward domain-specific architectures, setting off a scramble among tools vendors to simplify and optimize existing tools and methodologies. The move reflects a sharp slowdown in Moore's Law scaling as the best approach for improving performance and reducing power. In its place, chipmakers — which now includes systems companies — are pushing... » read more

Reliability Concerns Shift Left Into Chip Design


Demand for lower defect rates and higher yields is increasing, in part because chips are now being used for safety- and mission-critical applications, and in part because it's a way of offsetting rising design and manufacturing costs. What's changed is the new emphasis on solving these problems in the initial design. In the past, defectivity and yield were considered problems for the fab. Re... » read more

The Third Generation Of FPGA Prototyping


Bench setups with physical prototypes lie at the very heart of electrical and electronic engineering. With all due respect to the many powerful forms of modeling and simulation, at some point the engineering team wants to work with hardware. When a system is built entirely from existing components, it is possible to build a prototype of the product as soon as it has been designed. When the desi... » read more

Taking 2.5D/3DIC Physical Verification To The Next Level


As package designs evolve, so do verification requirements and challenges. Designers working on multi-die, multi-chiplet stacked configurations in 2.5/3D IC designs can use Calibre 3DSTACK physical verification checks to verify die alignments for proper connectivity and electrical behavior. The Calibre 3DSTACK precheck mode enables design teams to find and correct basic implementation mistakes ... » read more

The Return Of DAC In-Person


Apart from masked faces everywhere, you could be excused for not knowing that there was a pandemic going on. Sure, the numbers were down, the show floor was smaller, and most of the parties didn't happen, but everyone was so happy to be able to bump elbows with their colleagues. Buttons were available for attendees to show the level of comfort they had with various types of greetings, from "... » read more

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