Better Quality RTL


How do you measure the quality of RTL? Philippe Luc, director of verification at Codasip, talks about identifying bugs, improving the overall quality of the verification, what happens when different blocks are used in a design, and how to improve efficiency in the verification process. » read more

Roaring ’20s For The Chip Industry


2020 was a good year for the semiconductor industry and the EDA industry that fuels it, but 2021 has the opportunity to be even better. New end application markets continue to open, and what were once seen as technical hurdles are leading to a multitude of innovative solutions, all of which need suitable tooling. No company can afford to invest everywhere, and so for EDA companies, their rel... » read more

Bug Escapes And The Definition Of Done


National Semiconductor's design center (NSTA) in Herzliya was the place where I fell in love with chip verification. I joined the team in 1999, still during my BSc, and met a group of innovators with a passion to create great ASICs and improve the way we did it at all costs. It was fast-moving learning for me, both on the verification engineering and verification management sides of things. ... » read more

Big Changes In Verification


Verification is undergoing fundamental change as chips become increasingly complex, heterogeneous, and integrated into larger systems. Tools, methodologies, and the mindset of verification engineers themselves are all shifting to adapt to these new designs, although with so many moving pieces this isn't always so easy to comprehend. Ferreting out bugs in a design now requires a multi-faceted... » read more

RISC-V Becoming Less Risky With The Right Verification


RISC-V continues to make headlines across the electronic design industry. You may have seen the recent news that the OpenHW Group is delivering their first RISC-V core, the CV32E40P. If you attended last month’s RISC-V Summit, perhaps you attended “CORE-V: Industrial Grade Open-Source RISC-V Cores” by Rick O’Connor, president of the OpenHW Group. In this session, Rick discussed how the ... » read more

Verification’s Inflection Point


Functional verification is nearing an inflection point, brought on by rising complexity and the many tentacles that are intermixing it with other disciplines. New abstractions or different ways to approach the problems are needed. Being a verification engineer is no longer enough, except for those whose concerns is block-level verification. Most of the time and effort spent in verification i... » read more

An Integrated Approach To Power Domain And Clock Domain Crossing Verification


Reducing power consumption is essential for both mobile and data center applications. The challenge is to lower power while minimally impacting performance. The solution has been to partition designs into multiple power domains which allow selectively reducing voltage levels or powering off partitions. Traditional low power verification validates only the functional correctness of power control... » read more

CEO Outlook: 2021


The new year will be one of significant transition and innovation for the chip industry, but there are so many new applications and market segments that broad generalizations are becoming less meaningful. Unlike in years past, where sales of computers or smart phones were a good indication of how the chip industry would fare, end markets have both multiplied and splintered, greatly increasin... » read more

Industry Transformations In 2021 And Beyond


Last December, the name of my predictions blog summarized my view crisply, which is that "applications, ecosystems and system complexity will be key verification drivers for 2020." Slam dunk on these. Application domains significantly impacted verification aspects in 2020. Who would have thought that Facebook and AWS would be among the keynotes at our user conference, speaking about how thei... » read more

A Tale Of Two Challenges: From Space Exploration To Unlocking Your Vision


I love a good puzzle, and I’m guessing most engineers do as well. After all, engineers spend their days solving complex problems to deliver the most advanced products to the world or to perform mission-critical tasks. We kicked off this season of merriment with the latter in mind at this year’s Nokia FPGA Conference and “Mission to Mars” Hackathon in late November. Now, just in time for... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →