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Posts Tagged ‘bandwidth’

Guest Post: Open Source Requires Open Minds, Especially in EDA Verification

Wednesday, July 20th, 2016

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. (more…)

Evolution or Revolution in System-Level Verification?

Thursday, July 14th, 2016

Recently, SemiconductorEngineering published the threepart 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.

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Opening a TrekBox for Your Birthday

Wednesday, June 29th, 2016

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.

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Automated, Realistic Performance Analysis for Your SoC

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2016

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.

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