Posts Tagged ‘project management’
Wednesday, September 20th, 2017
 Are you a requirements engineer but your main goal is to provide well organized documentation? Do you have a great knowledge about the industry, business analysis and systems but you are struggling with the shape and look of your documentation? Do you still hear, for instance, that the specification document is not easy to read and difficult to use?
Requirements first
Requirements are the starting point of all other activities in a project lifecycle. So the specification document is crucial for the project. The document has many audiences such us stakeholders, designers, verification engineers and other groups involved in the project. This forces the author of the document to take care of the structure and organization of the document. It is not a big deal to prepare such a document. The problem is that the document has to be modified many times. The requirements are constantly changing, with new features appearing, some being modified and some being removed. Reclassification and reorganization must be repeated many times. In which case, I am pretty sure you will be contending with issues such as auto numbering, indentation, paragraph styles as well as tables and drawings that just do not fit the page.
Another kind of trouble comes from collaboration. Requirements should be developed by more than one engineer but working together on the same document is really a challenge. Forgetting to enable Track Changes, using the wrong version of a document or even using different version of Office tools are the most common collaboration issues.
Finally, there may be a situation in which you focus on a document’s structure and aesthetics more than its content. In the end your document may be well prepared but there is a serious risk that the requirements will be ambiguous, incomplete and/or inconsistent. This can happen when huge amounts of energy are spent solely on keeping the document organized and current. For the rest of this article, visit the Aldec Design and Verification Blog.
Tags: asic, FPGA, project management, spec-tracer, verilog
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Friday, January 22nd, 2016
 I like FPGAs. My first experience with an FPGA was my university final year project where I demonstrated BIST with four Xilinx© 3000 devices; this was before FPGAs had JTAG built in. Filling up these devices with ViewDraw schematics required many hours in front of a terminal. Fast track to today’s advances such as Xilinx UltraScale and Vivado HLx, and I hope you would agree things have moved on quite a bit.
Amid all this changes, however, there are some things that have remained constant. Those are the three things that are great about FPGAs: they are reprogrammable, reprogrammable, and, they are reprogrammable!
So how is this capability utilized? Here are three examples:
Electronic products using FPGAs:
I think it is important not look at FPGAs as some poor cousin of an ASIC. This view is from the days of LSI Logic and Xilinx marketing battles, when FPGAs were used for mopping up “glue logic”. Today an FPGA provides a massively parallel programmable digital platform with a lot of silicon IP, such as high-performance interfaces. This capability is widely used by many industries now; it is not solely driven by the volume of parts. Today, you even find FPGAs in consumer products.
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Tags: acceleration, asic, embedded, FPGA, hardware, project management, university, verification, Xilinx
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Wednesday, August 28th, 2013
 As the proud Product Manager of Aldec’s FPGA Design Simulation solution, I am excited (like it was my first Cranberries concert) to announce that Active-HDL™ is celebrating 16 years since its initial release in 1997. Active-HDL has not merely stood the test of time, it has dominated the FPGA market like a Hulk Hogan smackdown with powerful simulation performance and debugging tools.
The key to Active-HDL’s long-term success lies in Aldec’s customer-centric philosophy. Simply put, we really do listen closely to our users and invest heavily in our tools. For this reason, continued simulation performance optimizations from release to release enable users to benefit from Active-HDL’s faster simulation even as the size of FPGA designs continues to grow.
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Tags: Active-HDL, Aldec, assertions, cen, chinese electronics news, co-simulation, coverage, debugging, debugging tools, design, digital, documentation, FPGA, fpga design simulation solution, fpga designs, HDL, ieee, matlab, os-vvm, project management, semiconductor industry, simulation, simulation platform, standards, top fpga design, university, verification, verification platform, verilog, VHDL, Xilinx
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Are you a requirements engineer but your main goal is to provide well organized documentation? Do you have a great knowledge about the industry, business analysis and systems but you are struggling with the shape and look of your documentation? Do you still hear, for instance, that the specification document is not easy to read and difficult to use?
