Digital Implementation Blogs

Hi Everyone, Many of you would have heard about the Cadence Stylus Common UI and are wondering what it is and what the advantages might be to use it versus legacy UI. The webinar answers the following questions: Why did Cadence develop Stylus UI and what is Stylus Common UI? How does someone invoke and use the Stylus Common UI? What are some of the important and useful features of the Stylus Common UI? ...

Optimizing power can be a very convoluted and crucial process. To make design chips meet throughput goals along with optimal power consumption, you need to plan right from the beginning!

In this blog, I will brief you about two very useful Rapid Adoption Kits (RAKs) for Liberate LV Library Validation.

Let’s review a key characteristic feature of Cadence Liberate AMS Mixed-Signal Characterization that offers to you ease of use along with many other benefits like automation of standard Liberty model creation and improvement of up to 20X throughput.

Cadence Liberate Trio Characterization Suite, ARM-based Graviton Processors, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud have joined forces to cater to the High-Performance Computing, Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence, and Big Data Analytics sectors.

As we embark upon our blogging journey again in 2020, in this Library Characterization Tidbits series, we want to draw your attention to an informative video series on memory characterization, which is available on the Cadence support portal.

When working on multiple tools of the Cadence Liberate Characterization Portfolio, do you tend to get confused about which commands or parameters are supported in a specific tool? Read more...

Each year, we survey the industry to get an idea of the industry’s experiences and expectations of high-level synthesis (HLS). As in last year’s survey , approximately half of the responses were from current HLS users, and half were from non-users. This year’s anonymous survey focused on productivity. Spoiler alert : Users find the HLS flow to be over 2.5x more productive for design and nearly 4x more productive...

Let’s read how you can use the Liberate Variety statistical characterization solution of the Cadence Liberate Characterization Portfolio for generating the statistical characterization models for standard cell libraries.

Characterization of standard cell libraries using the Liberate Characterization solution is broadly divided into five stages. Read this blog to know about the related basics and the step-by-step procedure.

Library Characterization Tidbits is a blog series aimed at providing insight into the useful software and documentation enhancements in the LIBERATE release.

There is no doubt that 2019 has seen an explosion of artificial intelligence/machine learning usage for Stratus HLS. In fact, this momentum started in 2017. Noting the increase in machine learning applications in our user base, we researched how to efficiently move from a TensorFlow model to hardware via Stratus HLS . By July 2018, AI startup Syntiant was talking at DAC about how they went from spec to tapeout in six...

As designs become complex and performance targets increase, time shrinks. Designers need to minimize time setting up design flows or trying to find workaround for many issues that might occur during tape out. The Cadence Online Support portal ensures 24x7 technical assistance to quickly address your technical issues and queries. In our continuous effort to improve the usability of the Online Support portal and efficiency...

A lot of AI design is done in software and, while much of it will remain there, increasing numbers of designs are finding their way into hardware. There are multiple reasons for this including the important goals of achieving lower power or higher performance for critical parts of the AI process. Imagine you need dramatically improved rate of object recognition in automated-driving applications. Implementing an AI...

Alexa, what is square root of 12547858? Within some nanoseconds, Alexa gives you the answer to it. That's how convenient technology has made things for us! How cool would it be if Alexa could get some help with the usage of parameters or commands while scripting? Well, we don't have Alexa to your rescue yet, but do have a cool help functionality that could save you time and effort of pulling out a reference manual...

The LIBERATE 19.2 production release is now available for download at Cadence Downloads . For information about supported platforms, compatibility with other Cadence tools, and details of key issues resolved in the LIBERATE 19.2 release, see the README.txt file. At the time of publishing, the link above was functional. If you encounter any links that are now obsolete, visit https://downloads.cadence.com , click...

In my previous blog post , I talked about the Quality-of-Results (QoR) that are achievable using High-Level Synthesis tools like Stratus HLS and the fact that exploration of multiple RTLL architectures is often the feature that enables HLS users to beat hand-coded RTL flows in terms of QoR. That article raised the notion that "project schedule" is a critical factor when judging comparative QoR, and it often gets left...

“ It’s not what it is, it’s about what it can become ” -The Lorax by Dr. Seuss Have you recently reached out to open your car and received an unexpected shock…zap! There are no financial or health implications if the door handle of your car zaps you, but an Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) zap event can instantly destroy devices worth billions of dollars. Today, we are aware of the destructive nature of ESD in integrated...

Earlier this year, we performed the annual high-level synthesis (HLS) industry survey to get an idea of the industry’s expectations of HLS. As in last year’s survey , approximately half of the responses were from current HLS users, and half were from non-users. This year’s anonymous survey focused on HLS usage and expectations. As usual, I’ll walk through the questions one by one below, but first let me give you what...

For years chip designers have dealt with ECO’s when their source code was written in RTL. But the move to high-level synthesis (HLS) means that their source code is now one step further removed from the gate level netlist. This naturally leaves a question, “What if I need an ECO on my Stratus project?” First and foremost, it’s important to understand that ECO’s are less common in the HLS flow. I’ll explain why in a...

At advanced nodes, there’s always a deep conflict between power, performance, and area (PPA) and design turnaround time (TAT). You already know Innovus Implementation System very smartly delivers PPA advantage and accelerates digital design TAT through various features, including its full-flow massively parallel architecture. Innovus 18.10 release takes all these benefits even further. In this blog, I will start with...

Whenever we talk to potential customers about Stratus HLS , we usually mention that many users get better quality of results (QoR) with a Stratus HLS flow than they did simply writing RTL by hand. Often, we are greeted with looks of skepticism or downright disbelief. We are usually asked the honest question: Can Stratus HLS really achieve better QoR than we can get using traditional RTL coding? I assure you that...

Over the past decade, we have seen a dramatic increase in the size of common video formats. Addressing this has required an evolution in the performance and complexity of video codecs, all the way from MPEG-2 to H.265. When designing hardware for these CODECs, high-level synthesis (HLS) has been a very common implementation tool of choice, due to the huge productivity gains provided by HLS and the ability of designers...

Gone is the day when companies (our customers) kept their use of high-level synthesis (HLS) quiet, a secret advantage over their competitors. As HLS usage became more widespread, the secret is out , and now the HLS community is talking and sharing experiences with each other. Take CDNLive , for instance. This year, HLS discussions are happening at the CDNLive shows worldwide. Since it’s extremely unlikely any of you...

After months of freezing temperatures in Pittsburgh, a 78 degree wind hit me as I stepped out of the office yesterday. While I’m sure it will be cold again by the time this blog gets published, yesterday made me think about how things are changing. In the 2017 annual HLS survey , we confirmed that wireless is the fastest growing market segment for high-level synthesis (HLS). That wasn’t much of a surprise, because...