The Breker Trekker 
Tom Anderson, VP of Marketing
Tom Anderson is vice president of Marketing for Breker Verification Systems. He previously served as Product Management Group Director for Advanced Verification Solutions at Cadence, Technical Marketing Director in the Verification Group at Synopsys and Vice President of Applications Engineering at … More » A Further Preview of DVCon India 2016August 24th, 2016 by Tom Anderson, VP of Marketing
Three weeks ago, we published a post on The Breker Trekker blog that previewed some of the talks and tutorials on the technical program at the upcoming third Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon) India on September 15-16 in Bangalore. More of the details on the conference are now available online, and for today we’d like to highlight some of the keynote addresses, panels, and poster sessions on the agenda that also stand out for us. As always, the program and steering committees have put a lot of thought into keynote speakers who will take a wide view of not just the EDA industry, but the larger electronics industry that we serve. Mentor CEO Wally Rhines is always a great speaker who comes armed with lots of charts and statistics to support his positions. His talk on “Design Verification: Challenging Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” will survey the history and evolution of verification while predicting some of the future challenges Why Portable Stimulus Must Be BidirectionalAugust 18th, 2016 by Tom Anderson, VP of Marketing
When we first began offering our Trek family of products for what’s now known as portable stimulus, we talked a lot about vertical and horizontal reuse. Vertical reuse means that you can create a scenario model for individual IP blocks and generate test cases to run in their UVM testbenches, then move up to clusters and subsystems. The IP models can simply be plugged together to form a higher-level model from which appropriate higher-level test cases can be generated. At the full-SoC level, you can generate C test cases that run on your embedded processors. Horizontal reuse is the ability to move from simulation to hardware (acceleration/emulation, FPGA prototypes, and silicon) while generating appropriate tests for these platforms from the same SoC scenario model. We generally described both forms of reuse in a unidirectional flow. However, bidirectionality is very valuable and, we believe, essential for portable stimulus. Let’s cover that topic in today’s blog post. Read the rest of Why Portable Stimulus Must Be Bidirectional IEEE Reports that C is the Most Popular Programming LanguageAugust 10th, 2016 by Tom Anderson, VP of Marketing
As some of you may have seen, two years ago the IEEE created an app that ranks the popularity of dozens of programming languages. They use twelve different metrics, from search results and social media mentions to technical publications and requirements listed in job openings. If you don’t like the way that they use these metrics, you can create your own ranking using your own mix. It’s really quite a clever idea and it generates lots of discussion every year. For 2014 and 2015, C held the #2 spot, just below Java in the rankings. The big news this year is that C has edged into first place, although the top two spots remain very close as measured by the metrics the IEEE has chosen to use. C++ was in the #3 spot for the past two years, but for 2016 flipped places with Python. As you all know, we are strong advocates of C/C++ for verification and so we’d like to share some thoughts on these results and what they mean for our industry. Read the rest of IEEE Reports that C is the Most Popular Programming Language DVCon India Just Keeps Getting BetterAugust 3rd, 2016 by Tom Anderson, VP of Marketing
As many of you know, in 2014 the longstanding Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon) expanded beyond Silicon Valley to India. The first year of DVCon India was very successful for a new event, drawing more than 450 attendees from more than 80 companies and universities. Last year’s show grew to more than 600 engineers attending the technical program, visiting the vendor exhibition, and enjoying the numerous opportunities to network with their peers. The third annual DVCon India will be held on September 15 and 16, once again at the Leela Palace in Bangalore. From our perspective, the show just keeps getting better and better every year. The full program is now available online, and for today’s post we’d like to mention some of the technical sessions that we think look especially interesting. In a future post, we’ll discuss other aspects of the program, including the keynote addresses. Guest Post: More on EDA Startups, Behemoths, Corner Stores, and ZombiesJuly 27th, 2016 by Tom Anderson, VP of Marketing
Three weeks ago on The Breker Trekker, we published a post on “The Return of EDA Startups, Behemoths, Corner Stores, and Zombies” and saw a nice uptick in viewing. Zombies are always popular with our audience. Our post prompted some interesting observations from today’s guest blogger, Excellicon’s Sales and Operations VP Rick Eram. He has some thoughts on this way of dividing the EDA industry and suggestions on how customers should treat the different players: The concept of corner stores is interesting since they pave the way for development and deployment of newer analysis and implementation technologies addressing today’s design challenges that are either not addressed by majors, involve much manual work despite available products, or are addressed by products that create a huge amount of data without means for interpretation. The startups develop new technologies and, while deploying their technology on their way to becoming corner stores, they master ways to deploy such new technologies. What differentiates corner stores from zombies is the deployment of the technology. These companies are the engines of innovation in today’s EDA industry and help the behemoths to cover the gaps in their traditional technologies after the newer technology catches on and adds value for customers. Read the rest of Guest Post: More on EDA Startups, Behemoths, Corner Stores, and Zombies Guest Post: Open Source Requires Open Minds, Especially in EDA VerificationJuly 20th, 2016 by Tom Anderson, VP of Marketing
Few recent announcements in the EDA, IP, or semiconductor industries have had the impact of SoftBank’s proposed US$32B acquisition of ARM. Many commentators have weighed in on this news. Today’s guest blogger, OneSpin Solutions Vice President of Marketing David Kelf, shares some thoughts on how changes to the ARM universe might intersect with ongoing changes in the open source community: One side effect of the ARM acquisition news was an increase in the debate on the fascinating RISC-V Open Source processor development. Clearly this has the interest of a number of significant ARM users, judging by the recent workshop at MIT last week as one example, and might represent a significant game changer. It also begs the question on the application of Open Source, and indeed standardization efforts in general, in verification and how programs in this area might change the dynamics of increasingly closed environments from the two largest EDA vendors. Read the rest of Guest Post: Open Source Requires Open Minds, Especially in EDA Verification Evolution or Revolution in System-Level Verification?July 14th, 2016 by Tom Anderson, VP of Marketing
Recently, SemiconductorEngineering published the three–part series “System-Level Verification Tackles New Role” as part of its ongoing “Experts at the Table” discussions. The format is simple–an editor sits down with four or five industry experts to discuss a particular topic–but the debate can be lively and the result educational. Breker participates in these roundtables as often as we can, focusing of course on verification among the many technical topics covered by the site. In advertising a “new role” for system-level verification, this particular series was not overstating the case. We tend to talk a lot about the evolution of verification in general, especially for system-on-chip (SoC) devices and multi-SoC systems. But in some ways what is happening now with our products and the Accellera portable stimulus standardization effort is more revolutionary than evolutionary. So which is it? We’ll attempt to answer that question in today’s post here on The Breker Trekker blog. Read the rest of Evolution or Revolution in System-Level Verification? The Return of EDA Startups, Behemoths, Corner Stores, and ZombiesJuly 5th, 2016 by Tom Anderson, VP of Marketing
If the title of today’s post sounds familiar, that’s not surprising. The most popular post in the history of The Breker Trekker blog, by a significant margin, was “An EDA Industry of Startups, Behemoths, Corner Stores, and Zombies?” published almost three years ago. I thought that it would be fun to revisit this topic in light of the changes in the EDA industry over the past three years. Have these changes fundamentally altered our world? Please read on to see. I’ll begin, as I did in the original post, by noting that the EDA industry used to be divided into only three categories: major leaguers, minor leaguers, and startups. Nearly all EDA startups disappeared after three or four years, with three possible endgames: acquisition, initial public offering (IPO), or bankruptcy. The major leaguers, at one time or another, included Daisy, Mentor, Valid, Cadence, Synopsys, and Avant. Read the rest of The Return of EDA Startups, Behemoths, Corner Stores, and Zombies Opening a TrekBox for Your BirthdayJune 29th, 2016 by Tom Anderson, VP of Marketing
Over the more than three years of posts here on The Breker Trekker blog, you’ve seen us reference our TrekBox runtime component on many occasions. We mention it in many contexts: test case visualization, memory usage visualization, test case status, test case debugging, system-level coverage, performance analysis, I/O interfacing, UVM testbench control, and more. We’ve never had a post on TrekBox itself, so today we rectify that and fill in a few details that we haven’t discussed before. Some of you are familiar with the term “trickbox” in the context of a simulation testbench. We found a nice concise definition of this term in an ARM patent: “Memory mapped (behavioral) test bench component to facilitate verification.” By writing to designated memory addresses, the processors in the design being verified can send messages to the testbench for various actions. Our TrekBox is of course a play on the “trickbox” name, and it provides many presents inside for those who open it. Automated, Realistic Performance Analysis for Your SoCJune 22nd, 2016 by Tom Anderson, VP of Marketing
We have a saying here at Breker that the fundamental job of any EDA company in the functional verification space is to “find more bugs, more quickly.” A good verification solution increases design quality by finding more bugs, improves time to market by closing verification faster, or reduces project cost by requiring fewer resources. A great verification solution, which we strive to offer, does all three. Accordingly, we talk a lot about the type of design bugs we can find with less time and effort than traditional methods. We have another saying at Breker: “A performance shortfall is a functional bug.” A lot of people differentiate between these two cases, but we don’t agree. The specification for your SoC describes its performance goals as well as its functionality. Not meeting your requirements for latency or throughout can render your SoC unsellable just as surely as a broken feature. So we also talk a lot about how our portable stimulus techniques generate test cases for performance verification. Read the rest of Automated, Realistic Performance Analysis for Your SoC |
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