Data-Driven Verification Begins


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss data-driven verification with Yoshi Watanabe, senior software architect at Cadence; Hanan Moller, systems architect at UltraSoC; Mark Conklin, principal verification engineer at Arm; and Hao Chen, senior design engineer at Intel. What follows are excerpts of that conversation, which was conducted in front of a live audience at DVCon. (L-R) Yosh... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Synopsys announced several new products: a new test family, a physical verification solution, and a software library for neural net SoCs. TestMAX, the new family of test products, includes soft error analysis and X-tolerant logic BIST for automotive test and functional safety requirements. TestMAX enables test through functional high-speed interfaces and supports early validation of DFT logi... » read more

Trends In FPGA Verification Effort And Adoption: The 2018 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study


As contributors and pioneers in the digital revolution, we are often so busy creating and innovating that we are compelled to focus on the trees, never mind the forest. But as we are all aware, the more we know about the bigger picture, context, historical and projected trends, or simply how other people are doing the same thing, the more efficiently and successfully we can do our jobs. Prov... » read more

Don’t Have A Meltdown Over A Spectre In Your SoC


You may be concerned about last year’s widely published Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities affecting most processors. Are your phone and computer OK? Or more importantly, if you are designing or verifying a System on Chip (SoC), do you have a specter in your design? Let’s first look at what these two vulnerabilities are and how they may be affecting your system. Both vulnerabilitie... » read more

New Design Approaches At 7/5nm


The race to build chips with a multitude of different processing elements and memories is making it more difficult to design, verify and test these devices, particularly when AI and leading-edge manufacturing processes are involved. There are two fundamental problems. First, there are much tighter tolerances for all of the components in those designs due to proximity effects. Second, as a re... » read more

Formal Verification Of RISC-V Cores


RISC-V is hot and stands at the beginning of what may be a major shift in the industry. Even a cursory review of upcoming conferences programs and recent technical articles makes that clear. While it is still early in the evolution of the processor architecture, there is certainly the potential that RISC-V will be a game-changer in the IP and semiconductor industry. As “a free and open ISA en... » read more

The Problem With Post-Silicon Debug


Semiconductor engineers traditionally have focused on trying to create 'perfect' GDSII at tape-out, but factors such as hardware-software interactions, increasingly heterogeneous designs, and the introduction of AI are forcing companies to rethink that approach. In the past, chipmakers typically banked on longer product cycles and multiple iterations of silicon to identify problems. This no ... » read more

Can Debug Be Tamed?


Debug consumes more time than any other aspect of the chip design and verification process, and it adds uncertainty and risk to semiconductor development because there are always lingering questions about whether enough bugs were caught in the allotted amount of time. Recent figures suggest that the problem is getting worse, too, as complexity and demand for reliability continue to rise. The... » read more

How to Connect Questa VIP to the Processor Verification Flow


Learn how to incorporate Questa VIP into your existing RISC-V verification flow. This step-by-step tutorial, prepared by Codasip’s verification experts, explains the concepts of combining automatically generated UVM with QVIP and guides you through the process. Read more here. » read more

Why Analog Designs Fail


The gap between analog and digital reliability is growing, and digital designs appear to be winning. Reports show that analog content causes the most test failures and contributes significantly more than digital to field returns. The causes aren't always obvious, though. Some of it is due to the maturity of analog design and verification. While great strides have been made in digital circuit... » read more

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