An Incremental Approach To Reusing Automated Tests From IPs To SoCs


Over the past few years, lots of energy has been invested in improving the productivity and quality-of-results of design verification. A promising effort toward this end is that both commercial and in-house tools have been developed to improve the productivity and efficiency of verification at the block, subsystem, and system levels. These tools raise the level of abstraction, increase test-gen... » read more

Lots Of Little Knobs For Power


Dynamic power is becoming a much bigger worry at new nodes as more finFETs are packed on a die and wires shrink to the point where resistance and capacitance become first-order effects. Chipmakers began seeing dynamic power density issues with the first generation of [getkc id="185" kc_name="finFETs"]. While the 3D transistor structures reduced leakage current by providing better gate contro... » read more

Which Verification Engine?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the state of verification with Jean-Marie Brunet, senior director of marketing for emulation at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor, a Siemens Business"]; Frank Schirrmeister, senior group director for product management at [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"]; Dave Kelf, vice president of marketing at [getentity id="22395" e_name="OneSpin Solut... » read more

How To Handle Concurrency


The evolution of processing architectures has solved many problems within a chip, but for each problem solved another one was created. Concurrency is one of those issues, and it has been getting much more attention lately. While concurrency is hardly a new problem, the complexity of today’s systems is making it increasingly difficult to properly design, implement and verify the software an... » read more

Making Machine Learning Portable


Machine learning is everywhere, and it has exploded at a pace no one would have expected. Even a year ago, ML was more of an experiment than a reality. NVIDIA's stock price (Fig. 1, below) is a good representation of just how quickly this market has grown. GPUs are the chip of choice for training machine learning systems. Fig. 1: Nvidia 5-year stock price. Source: Google Finance Ma... » read more

Inside UVM


We have all been witnesses to the rapid improvements of the iPhone processor chip every year. With the iPhone 8 featuring the newest A11 Bionic at 10 nm FinFET with 4.3 billion transistors, I can’t personally fathom the amount of the verification effort needed for this type of SoC - the required manpower and time to get the job done is absolutely mind-boggling. Thankfully, we have several pre... » read more

Four Steps To Verifying An SSD Controller With Emulation


By Ben Whitehead and Paul Morrison Datacenters, cloud computing, the IoT, and all things electronic demand that huge amounts of data and information are stored securely and accessible anywhere at any time. This requirement is driving the adoption of new storage technologies. The capacity, size and performance of solid state drives (SSDs) make it a very interesting technology. It offers h... » read more

Drones, Augmented Reality, UHD TV


New markets for multimedia and high-definition video chips are quickly becoming the next wave fueling the electronics industry. One market that demonstrates a mega-appetite for electronics is the drone market. The main IC components in drones that require exhaustive verification are the video capture circuitry and data collection components that either store data in-system or upload that data t... » read more

Body Bias: What It Is, And Why You Should Care


In case you hadn’t noticed, the use of integrated circuits (ICs) has exploded over the past decade. From the cheapest novelty toy to automobiles to implanted medical devices, it seems like everything we touch has an electronic component in it somewhere. Not surprisingly, that growth has brought with it a vastly expanded number and variety of IC design requirements that design companies must s... » read more

The Chiplet Option


All of the leading chipmakers, foundries and OSATs are now working with some sort of advanced packaging. The next step is to add some consistency to those efforts to be able to assemble chips much more quickly and inexpensively. DARPA has been promoting chiplets as the best way to solve this problem, and for the military, this is a pretty logical choice. With a push toward heterogeneity in c... » read more

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