Community

I hope it isn't a surprise to anyone reading this blog that the share of a vehicle's cost that goes to electronics is increasing rapidly. I expect most readers participate in some way in the ecosystem that supplies the electronics, most of which is semiconductor...

In Game of Thrones, ravens are George RR Martin's way of getting information around faster than a horse, the email of his world. At UC Berkeley, Raven is a RISC-V processor, with an attached vector processing unit, aiming for extreme energy efficiency...

I had an exciting week in July here in Pittsburgh, PA with the IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI.org). I was fortunate enough to be invited to do one of the keynotes at the Symposium, thanks to the co-chairs: University of Pittsburgh...

I think the person who has the strongest claim to putting the silicon in Silicon Valley is William Shockley. He was one of the three people, along with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, to invent the transistor in 1943, for which they subsequently won...

https://youtu.be/X-hVSQfbtFE

Searching for “automatic coverage maximization” results with ~16 million hits. Alas, this does not reflect 16 million solutions, rather it is an indication of the big interest in this topic, and the many attempts to automate the process of “getting full coverage, faster”. There are several tools available, performing smart coverage analysis and directing the tests to the less covered areas.

For…

At what has now become the Linley Mobile and Wearables Conference, Linley pointed out that wearables are growing at 38%.

However, there was a big caveat on Linley's slide, that this assumes "Apple releases a popular smart watch in 2017" followed by ...

MIPI DevCon 2016 – Mobile and Beyond

The word “beyond” may bring up thoughts of the new Star Trek Beyond movie, or for those of you who are fascinated by real space travel, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Maybe that’s why the first MIPI Alliance® Developer’s Conference will be held in, Mountain View, California, near the NASA Ames Research Center. The real lesson…

The keynote at CDNLive Bengaluru was given by Michal Siwiński. Since day 1 of CDNLive is verification and PCB, and day 2 is digital and analog implementation, almost nobody attends both days. So the keynote was repeated the second day by Vivek Mishra...

There is little doubt that Internet of Things has become the next big thing in business, in particular in semiconductor IP. The growing number of devices monitoring and adjusting our surroundings – lighting, temperature, sound volume and others has exploded in the recent years, and actually, so did the number of pins within an SoC that is needed to connect them all.

Also, the use cases for the new generation of…

SEMICON West runs a sort of award program called Best of the West. Companies submit products, six finalists are chosen, and a final Best of the West is selected. Since SEMICON covers such a wide range, the entries cover everything from wafer processing...

The post A Perspective on Perspec earlier this week introduced the idea of Perspec System Verifier, that if you have a fairly abstract model of the system at a very high level, you can automatically generate scenarios to verify high-level functionality...

The adoption and usage of advanced node technology (16nm and below) has been extraordinary over the last few years. However, along with the benefits in power and area, the new nodes also contain new challenges when it comes to properly determining the variation caused by the smaller geometries.  Much has been written about the proper ways to physically implement a FinFET design, but less has been written on the need for…

http://youtu.be/ZkZQAW6Gl7M

Monday: At SEMICON West the winner of the "Best of the West" award was Coventor. Take a look at their technology for virtual fabrication of wafers.

Tuesday: The keynote at CDNLive in Bengaluru was given by Michal...

The Palladium Z1 is an enterprise-level emulation system. If you don't already know about it, you can read my post Palladium Z1, an Enterprise Server Farm in a Rack. The Protium platform is an FPGA prototyping system. If you don't know about it, you...

"Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est" were the opening words to Julius Caesar's account of the Gallic war. All Gaul is divided into three parts. He went on to explain that they were the Belgians in the north east, the Aquitaine south of the Loire river...

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Paul Garden provides more details on the new Tensilica Fusion G3 DSP features. He’ll discuss the benefits of the 128-bit SIMD ALU, instruction formats, auto-vectorizing compiler, and the software DSP library. The Fusion G3 is a fixed- and floating-point DSP for automotive, mobile, industrial, and general embedded DSP applications, is easy to program, and has exceptional out…

This month we released 10 new Verification IP for leading-edge protocols! Did I say 10? Yet again, we continue to be first in the market with support for protocols used in leading-edge applications like video-on-demand, cloud computing, big data, and higher resolution videos that are used in the automotive, mobile, enterprise networking, and consumer industries.

What are those 10 protocols that will help you design…

Today we have UVM, the universal verification methodology. This is great for verifying IP blocks. But when it comes to verifying at the system level, something higher level is required, something that allows verification to move up to the system level...

The big buzz in the automotive industry lately is autonomous driving vehicles. Companies like Mercedes, BMW, Google, and Tesla have already released, or are soon to release, self-driving features that give the car some ability to drive itself. Several other companies are also currently working on this technology. As a result, future cars will be equipped with sensor clusters, more computing power, Car2X communication…

It's verification week this week, with 5 posts about various aspects of Cadence's portfolio of verification tools.

http://youtu.be/1xOgXlm8bc0

Monday: At CDNLive in Bengaluru, Michal Siwiński gave a Verification Technology Update. Learn about...

At CDNLive in Bengaluru last week, Michal Siwiński gave a technology update on verification to everyone. Well, the PCB folks had already gone off to another room for their own update. The first thing that he pointed out is that verification is starting...