Taming Concurrency


Concurrency adds complexity for which the industry lacks appropriate tools, and the problem has grown to the point where errors can creep into designs with no easy or consistent way to detect them. In the past, when chips were essentially a single pipeline, this wasn't a problem. In fact, the early pioneers of EDA created a suitable language to describe and contain the necessary concurrency ... » read more

Efficient Hierarchical Verification For Low Power Designs


By Susantha Wijesekara and Himanshu Bhatt Growing design sizes, low power (LP) complexity and the need for early stage verification is making designers adopt hierarchical verification flows. Traditionally for hierarchical verification, designers use a black box, liberty model based hierarchical flow, timing model (ETM) flow or stub/glass box flows that offer various degrees of trade-offs for... » read more

Boosting Analog Reliability


Aveek Sarkar, vice president of Synopsys’ Custom Compiler Group, talks about challenges with complex design rules, rigid design methodologies, and the gap between pre-layout and post-layout simulation at finFET nodes. https://youtu.be/JRYlYJ31LLw » read more

Computer Vision Sees a Bright Future


Computer vision is powering advances in automotive, medical, consumer, and agriculture markets. Because the world of computer vision coupled with machine learning evolves so quickly, teams need a way to design and verify an algorithm while the specifications and requirements evolve without starting over every time there is a change. The only way to successfully develop these systems is to use h... » read more

Testing AI Systems


AI is booming. It's coming to a device near you—maybe even inside of you. And AI will be used to design, manufacture and even ship those devices, regardless of what they are, where they are used, or how they are transported. The big questions now are whether these systems work, for how long—and what do those metrics even mean? An AI system, or AI-enhanced system, is supposed to adapt ove... » read more

Chip Industry In Rapid Transition


Wally Rhines, CEO Emeritus at Mentor, a Siemens Business, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about global economics, AI, the growing emphasis on customization, and the impact of security and higher abstraction levels. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Where do you see the biggest changes happening across the chip industry? Rhines: 2018 was a hot year for fab... » read more

Using Software Approaches In Hardware Verification


Agile methodologies, created to improve quality in software code, increasingly are being applied to hardware verification. This is less of a drastic shift than it might first appear. Developing a verification testbench is largely software, and similar methodologies can be used for reducing bugs in hardware. “A testbench is nothing more than a big software project, and it makes perfect s... » read more

Fundamental Shifts In 2018


What surprised the industry in 2018?  While business has been strong, markets are changing, product categories are shifting and clouds are forming on the horizon. As 2018 comes to a close, most companies are pretty happy with the way everything turned out. Business has been booming, new product categories developing, and profits are meeting or beating market expectations. "2018 was indeed a... » read more

Verification Throughput Is Set To Increase By Leaps And Bounds In 2019


In June 2015, I wrote the blog “Towards A Metric To Measure Verification Computing Efficiency” that introduced what we now refer to here at Cadence as the “productivity wheel” for verification payloads—the sequence of “build”, “allocate”, “run” and “debug” that is repeated thousands of times during a project. It was meant to set up the launch of the Palladium Z1 platfo... » read more

Debug Tops Verification Tasks


Verification engineers are spending an increased percentage of their time in debug — 44%, according to a recent survey by the Wilson Research Group. There are a variety or reasons for this, including the fact that some SoCs are composed of hundreds of internally developed and externally purchased IP blocks and subsystems. New system architectures contribute to the mix, some of which are be... » read more

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