Addressing The Challenges Of Reset Verification In SoC Designs


This paper presents commonly occurring challenges involved in reset tree verification and their solutions. We lay out a three part approach to build a complete solution that combines static analysis of the design structure, RTL simulation with X-propagation, and formal verification. The paper includes results from testing this solution on a customer design. To read more, click here. » read more

How Does A Changing Automotive Ecosystem Affect Tier-1 Suppliers?


Tier-1 automotive suppliers have an enormous opportunity in the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs). Fortune.com sees these vehicles contributing $7 trillion in economic activity by the year 2050. But this opportunity comes with a challenge: the whole supply chain is being disrupted by new participants and new technologies that are making these AVs possible. Semiconductor companies and spe... » read more

Emulation Fills The Pre-Silicon Verification Gap For Autonomous Vehicles


Veloce emulators provide the scale and performance to ensure that automotive applications run smoothly, safely, and securely. This paper describes how emulation is used to run realistic driver scenarios, investigate vehicle dynamics, and analyze power and communications metrics — all in a platform that virtualizes the design and allows both hardware and software to be tested together or separ... » read more

Which Verification Engine When


Frank Schirrmeister, group director for product marketing at Cadence, talks about which tools get used throughout the design flow, from architecture to simulation, formal verification, emulation, prototyping all the way to production, how the cloud has impacted the direction of the flow, and how machine learning will impact verification. » read more

Rapid Evolution For Verification Plans


Verification plans are rapidly evolving from mechanisms to track verification progress into multi-faceted coordination vehicles for several teams with disparate goals, using complex resource management spread across multiple abstractions and tools. New system demands from industries such as automotive are forcing tighter integration of those plans with requirements management and product lif... » read more

Abstract Verification


Verification relies on a separation of concerns. Otherwise the task has no end. Sometimes we do it without thinking, but as an industry, we have never managed to fully define it such that it can become an accepted and trusted methodology. This becomes particularly true when we bring abstraction into the picture. A virtual prototype is meant to be true to behavior, but there could be timing d... » read more

5G Needs Cohesive Pre- And Post-Silicon Verification


While 5G doesn’t start from a clean slate, it does make significant changes to the 4G architecture. These changes mean that the ecosystem from chips to operators is evolving, giving opportunities to more companies to engage in this growing market. Realignment in fronthaul, midhaul and backhaul In particular, the radio access network (RAN) has been redefined as Cloud RAN (sometimes called ... » read more

Extending Portable Stimulus


It has been a year since Accellera's Portable Test and Stimulus Specification became a standard. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the impact it has had, and the future direction of it, with Larry Melling, product management director for Cadence; Tom Fitzpatrick, strategic verification architect for Mentor, a Siemens Business; Tom Anderson, technical marketing consultant for OneSpin... » read more

Focus Shifts To Wasted Power


Mobile phones made the industry aware of power, but now the focus is shifting to the total energy needed to perform a task. Activity that is unnecessary to perform the intended task is wasted power, and reducing it requires some new methodologies and structural changes within development teams. There is a broadening awareness about power. "The companies doing SoCs for mobile lead the charge ... » read more

Testing Against Changing Standards In Automotive


The infusion of more semiconductor content into cars is raising the bar on reliability and changing the way chips are designed, verified and tested, but it also is raising a lot of questions about whether companies are on the right track at any point in time. Concerns about liability are rampant with autonomous and assisted driving, so standards are being rolled out well in advance of the te... » read more

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