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Verification: Performance Tips and Tricks: Coding e Ports for Enhanced Performance

teamspecman

This blog entry builds on last week's Tips and Tricks posting in which we discussed the usage of list.delete(0) in Tip 1. This week, we discuss a topic that is close to many users. Ports are used widely throughout the verification environment as one of the main mechanisms for interacting with HDL code running within the simulator. Here are a few ways to improve performance when it comes to ports.
Tip 2: Use Port …
- 3 Sep 2010
SoC and IP: The 6-minute video guide to memristors (must-see video)

archive

With the August 31 announcement that Hynix is now working with HP to bring the semi-mythical memristor to market in commercial devices, I went searching for a good explanation of how HP’s memristors are made and how they work. It turns out that they are anatomically simple and relatively easy to understand, if you have the right teacher. HP’s R. Stanley Williams is the right teacher, for me at least, and he made a 6-minute…
- 2 Sep 2010
SoC and IP: Chemical vapor deposition creates improved material for PCM (phase-change memory)

archive

Yesterday, semiconductor materials manufacturing specialist ATMI and Ovonics, the company that’s long been associated with amorphous semiconductor research, jointly announced yet another advance in PCM (phase change memory) materials science. The two companies have been experimenting with chemical-vapor deposition (CVD) of GST (germanium antimony telluride) thin films used for creating PCM elements rather than sputtering…
- 2 Sep 2010
SoC and IP: Commodore and its iconic all-in-one computers resurrected with new guts, including DDR3

archive

Everyone familiar with the arc of personal computers knows Commodore. The calculator company that became a personal-computing powerhouse starting with the Commodore Pet 2001, which it introduced in 1977, rose to superstar status with the best-selling Commodore 64 (more than 30 million sold!) based on a derivative of the 6502 microprocessor. Commodore International later became famous for the Amiga, machine based on the…
- 2 Sep 2010
Verification: Join Us at FMCAD October 20-23

TeamVerify

Are you deeply interested in formal and assertion-based verification technology? Are you wondering what algorithms and methodologies are coming over the horizon in this rapidly evolving space? Have you been looking for an opportunity to influence the leading thinkers in this field with feedback from your real world experiences?
If so, we recommend you join us at the 10th International Conference on Formal Methods in Computer…
- 1 Sep 2010
System, PCB, & Package Design : What's Good About AMS Simulator New Design Templates? They’re in the SPB16.3 Release!

Jerry GenPart

What's Good About AMS Simulator New Design Templates? They're in the SPB16.3 Release!What's Good About AMS Simulator New Design Templates? They're in the SPB16.3 Release!What's Good About AMS Simulator New Design Templates? They're in the SPB16.3 Release!What's Good About AMS Simulator New Design Templates? They're in the SPB16.3 Release!The SPB16.3 release of Allegro AMS Simulator now…
- 1 Sep 2010
Verification: All I Really Need to Know About MDV I Learned From Hollywood - Part 2

tomacadence

My last blog entry began a series using quotes from Hollywood movies to illustrate some of the key concepts about metric-driven verification (MDV). Given that this idea was inspired by a rather strange dream, I'm pleased to report that the feedback has been very positive and that I didn't seem to creep anyone out. So I'll forge ahead: last time I dealt with the planning phase and this time it's on to the "construct…
- 1 Sep 2010
SoC and IP: HP’s memristor finds a commercial semiconductor vendor: Hynix

archive

The rumor at the recent Flash Memory Summit held earlier this month was that HP was about to announce an agreement with a commercial semiconductor vendor to take the fabled memristor, heretofore an almost mythical memory element seen only by researchers within HP Labs, into production. The rumor got the announcement date and the vendor wrong, but it was essentially true. Today, HP and Hynix announced that they will jointly…
- 31 Aug 2010
SoC and IP: Toshiba 24nm, 64-Gbit NAND Flash: Just a silly nanometer shorter

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Toshiba announced today that it has initiated mass production of NAND Flash memories using 24nm process technology. The initial devices are MLC (2 bits/cell) 64-Gbit devices with Toggle-Mode DDR interfaces for high transfer speed. Toshiba also plans to make TLC (3 bits/cell) and 32-Gbit devices using this process technology. This announcement puts Toshiba ahead in the “20nm-class club.” Other members of the club include…
- 31 Aug 2010
SoC and IP: 17 SSDs reviewed by Tom’s Hardware

archive
We’re still at the stage where there can be appreciable differences in the performance of various SSDs. In that light, Tom’s Hardware released performance test results on 17 different SSDs today. Some of the SSDs included in the tests are:

Asax Leopard Hunt II (TS25M64, 128 Gbytes)

Asax Server One 120 (200 Gbytes)

Crucial RealSSD C300 (64 Gbytes)

G.Skill Phoenix FM25S2S (100 Gbytes)

G.Skill…
- 31 Aug 2010
SoC and IP: Huawei talks Smart Memory at Hot Chips 22: “The only practical solution”

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Last week saw the 22nd Hot Chips conference, held at held Stanford University, and one of the companies presenting their latest thoughts on “hot chips” was global networking leader Huawei. Sailesh Kumar presented some details on a network-processing chip currently under development at Huawei that is essentially “smart memory.” Such a chip is mostly memory--in this case, according to an EETimes article (http://www.eetimes…
- 30 Aug 2010
SoC and IP: A non-exhaustive list of 150 SSD vendors

archive

A recent check of the Yahoo! Finance boards showed some skepticism about my previous statement that there were 200 SSD players in the market. Here’s a list of about 150 vendors compiled from various pages at www.storagesearch.com. It’s not a list of 200 vendors, but I don’t think it’s exhaustive either. Storagesearch has been published by Zsolt Kerekes since 1996. He’s an SSD analyst and his site aims to be comprehensive…
- 26 Aug 2010
SoC and IP: PCM (now with carbon nanotubes!) programming current drops two orders of magnitude

archive

A fascinating Masters thesis written by Feng Xiong details the fabrication and testing of a phase-change memory (PCM) element using carbon nanotube FETs and “microbubbles” of GST to create extremely small, non-volatile memory elements. (GST is the chalcogenide glass material usually employed as the phase-change media in PCM and widely used as the active material in recordable CDs and DVDs.) Fusing a GST microbubble with…
- 26 Aug 2010
SoC and IP: Seagate and Samsung to jointly develop enterprise-class SSD controller -- a little more info

archive

A bit more than a week ago, HDD leader Seagate and NAND Flash leader Samsung jointly announced that they would cooperate on the development of an SSD controller. The announcement mentions “Seagate's leadership in enterprise storage technology” and “Samsung's flash memory technology specific to 30 nanometer-class MLC NAND.” There’s a little more information in a blog posted the same day by David Szabados, who manages the…
- 26 Aug 2010
Verification: All I Really Need to Know About MDV I Learned From Hollywood - Part 1

tomacadence

True story: this series of blog posts is inspired by a dream. I recently gave a presentation on the Cadence verification business to our CEO and several members of the Executive Management Team. Naturally, I took this presentation seriously and spent a lot of time preparing the material and thinking through the key points to cover in the limited time I would have with this high-powered audience. The prep work must have…
- 25 Aug 2010
SoC and IP: 8 key takeaways for system design teams from the Flash Memory Summit

archive
Cadence’s Senior Manager of Technical Communications and a longtime EDA observer Richard Goering attended the recent Flash Memory Summit held last week in Santa Clara, California and came away with eight key ideas that closely tie memory to system design. The first four are:

Memory may be the most important part of your system.

You have to understand the end-user applications to choose a memory subsystem.
…
- 25 Aug 2010
Analog/Custom Design: Things You Didn't Know About Virtuoso: Outputs Setup in ADE XL

stacyw

Continuing on our exploration of ADE XL (see here and here for previous articles), today let's take a look at the Outputs area in the center of the screen.

Any output signals or expressions which appear in the ADE XL Test Editor (or the ADE L window if you created the setup in there) will show up automatically in the Outputs Setup tab. You can still work with them the same way you always have by bringing up the Test…
- 25 Aug 2010
System, PCB, & Package Design : What's Good About Capture Objects Look and Feel? You Can Change Them in SPB16.3!

Jerry GenPart

The SPB16.3 release of Allegro Design Entry CIS (known as Capture) has some cool new features! You can now change the look and feel of a wire or a net on a schematic page by changing the color, line style or line width. Also, Capture now allows you to alter the look and feel of the hierarchal block to change the color of a specific block in your design.
Read on for examples and details....

Changing the wire or bus look…
- 25 Aug 2010
SoC and IP: Kingston DDR3 RAM cracks 3Gtransfers/sec barrier, achieves 3.068 Gtransfers/sec amid clouds of supercooled nitrogen

archive

Mix liquid nitrogen and Kingston’s HyperX DDR3-2333 SDRAM modules and you get 3068 Mtransfers per second (DDR3-3068). That’s what Benjamin “Benji Tshi” Bioux and Jean-Baptiste “marmot” Gerard demonstrated to a packed room full of gamers on August 21 at the recent Gamescon event held in Cologne, Germany (as reported by Softpedia). Boosting SDRAM transfer rates using liquid nitrogen to cool semiconductors below 77K (− …
- 25 Aug 2010
Digital Design: CDNLive! Silicon Valley Abstract Deadline Extended 1 Week

BobD

The deadline for submitting abstracts to CDNLive! Silicion Valley 2010 has been extended 1 week to Sunday August 29th. The conference begins October 26th at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, California.
If you've already submitted an abstract: Thank you!
If you haven't yet, I'd highly recommend you take a moment to consider taking part in this year's conference. I think the most common reason people don…
- 25 Aug 2010
Verification: System Realization Webinars Start Sept 8th

Steve Brown

Starting September 8th Cadence will be hosting a series of webinars about various topics in the area of System Realization. Several of these webinars will be led by members of the System Realization Alliance, sharing their particular views and contri...
- 24 Aug 2010
SoC and IP: OCZ accentuates the positive (SSDs) and eliminates the negative (low-margin DRAM modules)

archive

PC add-on vendor OCZ has announced today that its future is in SSDs and high-speed DRAM. The company plans to discontinue low-margin, commodity level DRAM module products in favor of add-ons with higher margins. OCZ's commodity DRAM module products currently represent roughly 70% of the Company's overall DRAM module revenue but over the past six quarters, said the company, the commodity DRAM module product line has operated…
- 24 Aug 2010
Verification: Performance Tips and Tricks: Another Specman Performance Series

teamspecman

Building on the great success of Efrat Shneydor's previous blog series, Performance-Aware e Coding Guidelines, a new "Specman Performance Handbook" was added to the 9.2 release of Specman Elite that included, on top of the previous blog items, a slew of other important tips and techniques on how to create more performance friendly code. Below is the first in a 5 part series of blogs based on excerpts from…
- 23 Aug 2010
Verification: Report On Chelsio’s DAC Case Study In Formal Verification

TeamVerify

As the leader of the Formal Verification R&D team, I'm always fascinated by the many ways our customers apply the tools we build. This year's Design Automatic Conference (DAC 2010) in Anaheim, CA, provided a wealth of examples thanks to a whole user track dedicated to "Case Studies in Formal Verification". The first paper in this series was titled "Leveraging Formal Techniques for Packed Based Designs…
- 23 Aug 2010
SoC and IP: Embedded SSDs: SanDisk’s iSSD puts 64Gbyte SATA SSD on a BGA device measuring only 16x20mm, 1.85mm high

archive

The convenience of SSDs that look like HDDs is that they can seamlessly plug and bolt into the same mechanical and interface infrastructure as their mechanical brethren. Many, many embedded designs would happily forego the mechanical compatibility in exchange for a smaller volumetric requirement because many embedded systems, like nearly all mobile devices, are quite short on extra volume. That’s precisely the market…
- 23 Aug 2010

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