Louie De LunaLouie is the Director of Marketing and Sales at Agnisys, Inc. He has over 15 years of experience in FPGAs, ASICs and EDA industries. Louie was most recently the Director of Marketing for Aldec where he was instrumental in the development and execution of the strategy for the entire functional verification solutions. He received his B.S. in Computer Engineering from University of Las Vegas, NV in 2001. « Less
Louie De LunaLouie is the Director of Marketing and Sales at Agnisys, Inc. He has over 15 years of experience in FPGAs, ASICs and EDA industries. Louie was most recently the Director of Marketing for Aldec where he was instrumental in the development and execution of the strategy for the entire functional … More »
November 1st, 2018 by Louie De Luna
Functional flaws in our everyday electronics are annoying. Internet routers can suddenly stop working, or our smart phones can suddenly freeze. For safety-critical systems such as the airplane engine control system, functional flaws can be catastrophic, and can lead to fatalities of all passengers. For both consumer-type and safety-critical systems, ASIC/FPGA teams strive to minimize functional flaws to the best of their abilities using their verification prowess with the help of EDA tools. The more the budget the better the resource they have for minimizing functional flaws.
I just attended the webinar about the results of the Wilson Research Group & Mentor’s 2018 Functional Verification Study, and I can say that I’m not surprised with the results regarding root causes of functional flaws – this is what my team and I come across with frequently when we talk to our prospective customers and verification community.
Read the rest of What ARE the Root Causes of Functional Flaws?
Tags: ASIC, DO-254, Embedded, FPGA, functional safety, Functional Verification, hsi, IDesignSpec, Specification, Verification
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October 23rd, 2018 by Anupam Bakshi
Our team is headed to Munich for DVCon Europe this week and we hope to see you there.
DVCon Europe- Booth #305
Munich, Germany
October 24-25, 2018
Related Press Release
Agnisys at DVCON Europe 2018: Presenting End-to-End Solution for Specification to Design and Verification of the Hardware/Software Interface
Agnisys Inc., the leading EDA provider of the industry’s most comprehensive solution for Design and Verification of the Hardware/Software Interface (HSI), will present the latest release of IDesignSpec™ at DVCon Europe in Munich, Germany on October 24-25, 2018.
“The latest release of IDesignSpec includes several new features to address emerging challenges associated with HSI particularly for large SoC designs,” said Anupam Bakshi, CEO. “Our customers across the globe predominantly develop the newest and greatest SoCs in the market and their requirements continue to push our product capabilities towards unexplored territories – helping us innovate further.”
Read the rest of Agnisys at DVCon Europe
Tags: DVCon, Embedded, hsi, IDesignSpec, SemiEDA, Verification
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September 20th, 2018 by Anupam Bakshi
UPDATE: This event has now passed.
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Join Agnisys for a free webinar on Thursday, September 27, 2018. I’ll be presenting as we take a deep dive into the current state of the art of HSI with a focus on the HSI layer in embedded systems.
The Hardware Software Interface is an integral part of any system development. Get this wrong and you can say adios to having a robust system. Get this right and say hello to productive teams and system development done right.
Register for a time that is convenient for you.
Tags: Embedded, hsi, IDS NextGen, Verification, webinar
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August 27th, 2018 by Anupam Bakshi
 As we travel professionally, sometimes we tend to miss some of the scenery along the way. We can get a bit of tunnel vision as we busy ourselves with client meetings, conferences, socializing with potential new clients, and uncovering new ways to improve and expand ourselves globally.
My first official trip to Edinburgh snapped me out of that. Edinburgh, Scotland’s compact, hilly capital, is a magical place. From its medieval Old Town and elegant Georgian New Town with gardens, I couldn’t help but slow down and take the time to appreciate my surroundings.
As I slowed down, little details caught my eye. I marveled at the public transport – so connected, punctual, convenient, and cost-effective. Not to mention the jovial nature of the Scottish people and the greetings and smiles I received every morning from strangers.
Between meetings, I squeezed in a visit an ancient monument – the Edinburgh Castle, Scotland’s most-visited paid tourist attraction. The Scottish monuments were quite spectacular and intricately detailed.
It was interesting to read that at the time of second world war, the Crown Jewels were kept in the Castle under a toilet! Of course, I had to see them, they didn’t allow a picture of the original but here is a photo its brass replica.
Read the rest of Out of the Office – Lessons from a client visit in Edinburgh
Tags: hsi, SemiEDA, stu sutherland, travel, webinar
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July 18th, 2018 by Anupam Bakshi
 This was an intriguing DAC. Hardware-Software Interface (HSI) is increasingly emerging as an area of importance, and because of this Agnisys has begun to emerge as a must-have toolset in the system development toolchain.
It still surprises me that some are just now waking up to this critical area of design. Teams are realizing that the chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and a design is only as robust as the weakest automation script. They are replacing their internal scripts with off-the-shelf professional tools. Agnisys, I’m proud to say, provides just that – professional products to replace register automation scripts.
One thing I did hear many times from attendees is that they are no longer satisfied with just creating register models. They want a test suite that automatically verifies the IP/SoC registers using a variety of techniques including C, UVM, and Formal. We nearly ran out of brochures for ARV-Sim™, ARV-Formal™, and ISequenceSpec™, as these products are intentionally built for exactly that.
Functional Safety driven by the ISO 26262 standard continues to be another hot area. Designers are looking for certified tools that can help them create autonomous vehicles and embedded electronics for automobiles. We shared our solution that fits in the intersection of Functional Safety and Electronic Design.
Read the rest of DAC 2018 Review with Anupam Bakshi, CEO: Emerging must-have toolset in System Development
Tags: dac, functional safety, hsi, machine learning, SemiEDA
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June 11th, 2018 by Anupam Bakshi
 Machine learning (or “ML” for short) may have begun life as something of a buzzword, but it has long since proven itself to be anything but. At its core, the term itself describes a situation where computer scientists use statistical techniques to essentially “learn” with data, without being specifically programmed to do so. In essence, you build a system to complete a specific task. The more data you feed into the system, the better it gets at that task – all without requiring human beings to make those improvements on their own.
This seemingly straightforward concept has led to a massive disruption in the field of electronic design, especially over the last few years. It has already led to the creation of a brand new class of embedded systems that use both machine learning and deep learning, otherwise known as ML/DL systems.
The Power of Machine Learning: Breaking It Down
Although it’s still a relatively new concept in the modern context, machine learning is already having a massive impact on just about every industry. Businesses regularly use machine learning systems powered by customer data to help improve satisfaction whenever possible. If you can power a machine learning system to analyze user activity in real-time, you’re therefore in a better position to identify the conditions for a potential account closure before it happens. You can then proactively reach out to that customer and save the account before they head off into the arms of a competitor. Or, a financial services company might use machine learning to better respond to changes and fluctuations in the local market as they happen. The system itself can quickly identify trends and patterns that would have otherwise went unnoticed, alerting humans to the idea that something is about to happen so that they can react in the most appropriate way.
Tags: IDS NextGen, machine learning, SemiEDA
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May 27th, 2018 by Anupam Bakshi
 The Intersection of Functional Safety and Electronic Design
In an industry that has gone through an incredibly rapid transformation over the past few years alone, auto manufacturers all over the world have had to rethink nearly every aspect of their own processes within the context of the 21st century. Because of this, an almost incredible emphasis has been placed on what concepts like “functional safety” even mean in 2018 (or 2019, or 2020 and beyond). This is especially true as vehicles incorporate more and more electronics with each passing day.
Autonomous vehicles have elevated this concern to the next level because as the level of control that a driver has over their car goes down, the liability of that car’s manufacturer shoots sky high. Many studies have shown that when automated systems are introduced into an industry, there is often a significant increase in the rate of “adverse” events as a result. This is the point that we have currently reached in terms of self-driving cars and functional safety.
In an effort to mitigate this risk as much as possible, functional safety is necessary – but in a way that also addresses the needs of what is already a high-volume, cost-sensitive industry. Luckily, the tools to address this problem sooner rather than later are already here. They just require us to keep a few key things in mind.
Functional Safety in Automotive Electronics: Breaking It Down
One of the most important elements of functional safety as it relates to the embedded systems that are now present in modern day vehicles has to do with fault detection. Simply put, regardless of where a particular fault comes from, the system’s ability to both A) identify it, and B) resolve it in the minimum time span possible is and will always be the goal.
In a lot of ways, this requires functional safety to take a more proactive approach to its own objective than ever before. Especially in an era of self-driving and autonomous vehicles where drivers are relinquishing more control all the time, the system itself must become aware of that fault and, if possible, recover from it, all without either endangering the passengers or requiring any intervention on their behalf, to begin with.
Tags: DO-254, functional safety, IDesignSpec, SemiEDA
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April 27th, 2018 by Anupam Bakshi
 Verification and Validation are two sides of the same coin
In 2011, Intel discovered a design flaw in its Sandy Bridge combination graphics-microprocessor chip that led to not only a major production delay but that ultimately cost more than $1 billion in replacement costs and lost revenue. If you’re searching for a clear-cut example as to why finding bugs early in the development process is always a top priority, look no farther than that. A product recall can be a terrible experience for everyone involved, but the costs associated with that recall alone are the stuff that nightmares are made of.
Yet at the same time, the complexity of the modern SoC environment has made things difficult in this regard to say the least. Getting SoC to market (and doing so with quality) is such an enormous task that teams are always looking for newer and more innovative ways to shorten the development time. The situation has also raised the requirement to incorporate verification and validation as a one-step process to catch bugs from an early design stage. Bringing the enormous tasks of verification and validation closer together is great news for the entire semiconductor industry.
This, however, is where the concept of “shift left” enters the conversation. As its name suggests, “shift left” is a series of activities and processes that better position design teams to anticipate and address downstream issues upfront, thus fixing a small problem now before it becomes a much bigger (and more expensive one) tomorrow. It’s the heart of the idea that you should “test early and often.” It also does so in a way that has proven to shorten development times so that no time is wasted late in the process where every second counts.
Why This Matters
But before we can focus on the importance of “shift left,” we must first address the early stages of this process in general. Verification and Validation are two critical steps in the creation of electronic systems, but over the last few years, in particular, their roles (and how those roles relate to one another) has changed.
In the modern era, there is an urgent need to enable users to describe the programming and test sequences of a device in a way that automatically generates sequences ready to use from an early design and verification stage, all the way up through post-silicon validation.
Tags: ISequenceSpec, SemiEDA, Verification
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