Is DVFS Worth The Effort?


Almost all designs have become power-aware and are being forced to consider every power saving technique, but not all of them are yielding the expected results. Moreover, they can add significant complexity into designs, increasing the time it takes to get to tapeout and boosting up the cost. Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) is one such power and energy saving technique now being... » 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

Confusion Persists In Verification Terms


I find it amazing that an area of technology that attempts to show, beyond a reasonable doubt, that a design will work before it is constructed can be so bad at getting some basic things right. I am talking about verification terminology. I have been in this industry for over 40 years and it is not improving. In fact, it is getting worse. The number of calls I have with people where they hav... » read more

The Power Of Visualization


In the 1990s, the National Semiconductor Israeli site in Herzliya was responsible for the design and verification of the company’s flagship RISC processor. That was the place and the time when the concept of constraint-random, abstract, coverage-driven verification was born. Engineers realized that without a random generation of stimuli opcodes, it would be very hard to fully verify new pr... » read more

Challenges In Using AI In Verification


Pressure to use AI/ML techniques in design and verification is growing as the amount of data generated from complex chips continues to explode, but how to begin building those capabilities into tools, flows and methodologies isn't always obvious. For starters, there is debate about whether the data needs to be better understood before those techniques are used, or whether it's best to figure... » read more

Radio Frequency Technology Is Found Everywhere In Daily Life


By Greg Curtis and YuLing Lin Innovation is everywhere around us. From high-performance computing, communications, autonomous driving, and the Internet of Things (figure 1), each segment has led to a rapid increase in design innovation. This innovation has been particularly true in communications, as Radio Frequency (RF) technology is found everywhere in daily life. RF technology is critical... » read more

How UVM Callbacks Simplify Assertion Validation


By Akshay Sarup and Mark Olen Assertions bring immediate benefits to the whole design and verification cycle; thus any challenges engineers face in coding and testing them are worth resolving. When a large number of assertions are to be validated, callbacks save time by eliminating the need to code a new sequence for each scenario. Callbacks also provide more dynamic and fine-grained cont... » read more

PCIe Simulation Speed-Up Using Mentor QVIP With PLDA PCIe Controller For DMA Applications


In this case study, PLDA explains how verification engineers can use Mentor’s Questa Verification IP (QVIP) to improve productivity during the functional verification of PCIe designs with DMA engines. The flexibility of Questa VIP was key to creating custom testbenches from scratch that can dynamically adapt to different IP topologies and configurations, mixing PCIe interfaces with multiple A... » read more

Problems And Solutions In Analog Design


Advanced chip design is becoming a great equalizer for analog and digital at each new node. Analog IP has more digital circuitry, and digital designs are more susceptible to kinds of noise and signal disruption that have plagued analog designs for years. This is making the design, test and packaging of SoCs much more complicated. Analog components cause the most chip production test failures... » read more

Creating Better Models For Software And Hardware Verification


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss what's ahead for verification with Daniel Schostak, Arm fellow and verification architect; Ty Garibay, vice president of hardware engineering at Mythic; Balachandran Rajendran, CTO at Dell EMC; Saad Godil, director of applied deep learning research at Nvidia; Nasr Ullah, senior director of performance architecture at SiFive. What follows are excerpt... » read more

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