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So you got the news: Calypto acquired Catapult-C, the ESL synthesis tool from Mentor Graphics. Calypto has been into low power (using notably sequential optimization techniques) and sequential verification for a while. And the company has always been very close to Mentor Graphics: it had integrated its verification tool with Catapult-C as early as 2005. [...] [...] Continue reading Mentor quitting on ESL? Systems on Chip (SoCs) integrate increasingly complex hardware features with even more complex software applications, which makes validating SoCs a challenging task. FPGA-based prototyping has become an increasingly popular way of validating SoCs, for good reasons: FPGA devices have enough capacity to fit complex ASICs, and run fast enough to interact with real world interface [...] [...] Continue reading Meet InPA, a newcomer in FPGA-based prototyping A FPGA company makes revenue with the hardware: it sells its device, and gives away its design tools –synthesis, place-and-route. Yet the EDA industry has had success with its own (non-free) FPGA synthesis solutions. For good reasons: in its days, Synplicity’s Synplify was the best FPGA synthesis out there. Synopsys acquired Synplicity two years ago, [...] [...] Continue reading Is FPGA a sustainable market for EDA? My last post must have struck a nerve. In this post I ask whether fundamental innovation stalled in formal verification, and I speculate which area the next technological leap will come from. This post received some quite interesting comments. It also brought a counter point by Brian Bailey, partially motivated by his business partnership with [...] [...] Continue reading Formal verification stalling, take two We all know that functional verification is the costliest and most time-consuming aspect of ASIC design –about 50% of the total cost, and from 40% to 70% of the total project duration. And we all know that simulation is by far the prevalent verification method, even though it is inherently incomplete due to an input [...] [...] Continue reading Has formal verification technology stalled? ICCAD’09 was a fairly good vintage. It started Monday morning with an excellent keynote from Hamid Pirahesh about cloud computing. The same day in the afternoon, a more EDA-focused discussion was initiated by Jim Hogan and Paul McLellan (slides can be found here), asking the question “What EDA needs to change for 2020 success?” Paul [...] [...] Continue reading What EDA needs to change for 2020 success? Functional verification is a major bottleneck in the chip design cycle. Any misstep in closing the functional correctness of a digital system costs millions of dollars in redesign, additional testing, and silicon respins. One can argue at length about its actual cost, but people in the industry usually agree that functional verification takes between 40 [...] [...] Continue reading The formal verification market is still untapped CodeProject I wrote earlier about the good practices in designing APIs, which is so important when developing complex software. However one usually does not have the chance to start a product from scratch. This means that more often than ever, a software manager picks up an existing tool with an existing team. Making the tool [...] [...] Continue reading Test-driven design, a methodology for low-defect software October 6th, 2009 | Tags: ASIC, EDA, low power, power gating, synthesis, verification | Category: EDA
A previous post showed a very-high level view of low power design with UPF/CPF. Power gating, a must-do for mobile products, is still a very manual process, and verifying the correctness of its implementation is a very challenging task. In this follow-up post, I single out some aspects of the power-gating flow, and I hint [...] [...] Continue reading Automated low-power design flow is up for grabs (Part II) October 5th, 2009 | Tags: ASIC, EDA, low power, power gating, synthesis, verification | Category: EDA
Low power is becoming more and more critical as the number of mobile and wireless applications is increasing. Battery life is a feature that can make the difference between a success and a flop. Remember the first version of the iPhone? All praised the touch screen interface, but so many criticized its poor battery life. [...] [...] Continue reading Automated low-power design flow is up for grabs (Part I) |
 
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