Power-Performance-Thermal


People like me are challenged in the culinary department. We believe that all we have to do is put the meat, vegetables, sauce and everything else in the recipe into the crockpot and a few hours later, out comes dinner. We (desperately) believe that we can dump the ingredients into a Ninja blender and get a healthy, tasty shake in a few minutes. (I have been politely informed that it is NOT the... » read more

Hybrid Vehicles = More Verification


While it is probably no surprise to anyone even slightly familiar with the complexity of hybrid electric vehicle systems, these designs require more intense verification than traditional combustion engine systems. To fill out the picture, Mick Tegethoff, director, AMS product marketing at Mentor Graphics, reminded that verification is a very broad term. “Let's say you are doing circuit sim... » read more

Still Time to Blow Up UVM


Blowing up UVM is something I ran on my own blog a few years ago. Considering not much has changed with respect to UVM – that it continues to dominate verification circles – I figured it’s a discussion worth re-starting. In my mind, it’s not too late to take a few steps forward by blowing up UVM. A little history… the idea to blow up UVM was motivated by a slide snapshot posted to ... » read more

Predictions For 2016: Tools and Flows


Seventeen companies sent in their predictions for this year with some of them sending predictions from several people. This is in addition to the CEO predictions that were recently published. That is a fine crop of views for the coming year, especially since they know that they will be held accountable for their views and this year, just like the last, they will have to answer for them. We beli... » read more

Are Chips Getting More Reliable?


Reliability is emerging as a key metric in the semiconductor industry, alongside of power, performance and cost, but it also is becoming harder to measure and increasingly difficult to achieve. Most large semiconductor companies look at reliability in connection with consumer devices that last several years before they are replaced, but a big push into automotive, medical and industrial elec... » read more

Beyond UVM Registers — Better, Faster, Smarter


Adoption of SystemVerilog UVM is growing stronger. Verification teams are expanding their knowledge with respect to UVM features and capabilities. These verification teams are using the UVM Register layer with good success. But the UVM Register layer has many moving parts and intricate details. It can be difficult to adopt and it can be difficult to model complex registers. It is a complex syst... » read more

Debug: Last Bastion Of Automation


There have been a number of times when anecdotal evidence became folk law and then over time, the effort was put in to find out whether there was any truth in it. Perhaps the most famous case is the statement that verification consumes 70% of development time and resources. For years this “fact” was used in almost every verification presentation and yet nobody knew where the number had come... » read more

The Future of Package Design Verification: Assembly Design Kits


Chip design companies and package assembly houses have no unified signoff verification process to ensure that an IC package meets manufacturability and performance requirements. Packages need a process that confirms the disparate products they contain can be manufactured within a single package. Mentor Graphics collaborated with Qualcomm and STATS ChipPAC to develop a prototype assembly design ... » read more

Bridging Hardware And Software


Methodology and reuse are two fairly standard concepts when it comes to semiconductor design, but they're viewed completely differently by hardware and software teams. It's a given that hardware and software have different goals and opinions about how best to do design. And while all agree that a single methodology can pay dividends in future chips, there is disagreement over who should shap... » read more

Executive Insight: Sehat Sutardja


Sehat Sutardja, chairman and CEO of Marvell, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about new approaches for design and memory and why costs and time to market are forcing changes in Moore's Law. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What was behind your move into modular packaging? Sutardja: The cost of building chips is getting out of hand. As we make things more ... » read more

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