Posts Tagged ‘EDA’
Wednesday, November 11th, 2015
One of the cliches we hear from time to time in the industry is “designers want to stick with a single language, but verification engineers love learning new things.” The implication seems to be that because verification engineers have diverse jobs that require them to juggle lots of different tools and models, they necessarily have to learn new languages and methodologies on a regular basis. Of course, they may not actually love learning new languages; doing so may just be in the nature of their work.
Regardless of whether or not they “love” new languages, it is clear that most verification projects involve multiple languages and multiple approaches. One way to gauge the current situation is to turn to the excellent survey that Mentor Graphics performs with Wilson Research Group every couple of years. Harry Foster wrote a series of posts on the Mentor verification blog that give considerable insight into what verification (and design) engineers are doing on real projects.
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Tags: Accellera, API, Breker, C/C++, Cadence, e, EDA, ESL, functional verification, Harry Foster, horizontal reuse, Mentor Graphics, OVL, portable stimulus, PSWG, simulation, SoC verification, subsystem, Synopsys, SystemC, SystemVerilog, Universal Verification Methodology, uvm, vertical reuse, VHDL
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Tuesday, November 3rd, 2015
The long-established trade association EDA Consortium (EDAC) has started several new initiatives to extend its membership to IP suppliers and to offer more value to its members through new programs. New EDAC Director Bob Smith has a bunch of innovative ideas and I have little doubt that they will breathe new life into the organization. I had the pleasure of working with Bob when he did some consulting for Breker several years ago, and he’s a true professional.
Last week I attended the first in a series of legal-themed events sponsored by EDAC. I expected that the title “Patents and Patent Litigation: Develop, Strengthen, and Protect Your Intellectual Property” would draw well, and indeed the conference room at SEMI Global Headquarters in San Jose was packed. I won’t attempt to cover the wide range of topics addressed, but I would like to hit a few highlights from the panel discussion and the excellent questions from the moderator and the audience.
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Tags: Accellera, Breker, Cadence, EDA, EDAC, Liccardo, mentor, patents, San Jose, standards, Synopsys, Trek, TrekApp, TrekSoC, USPTO
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Wednesday, October 28th, 2015
Those of us of a certain age will remember the secret decoder rings promoted by various products and TV shows. They generally used a simple substitution code to map letters to numbers. According to Wikipedia these have been offered as recently as 2000, so perhaps they are known to younger readers as well. What’s germane to today’s blog post is that formal services company Oski Technology has cleverly used this device as a graphical element in promoting its “Decoding Formal” Club series.
I’ve reported before from these events, which I believe have been very effective at advocating for formal analysis, sharing tricks and techniques, and demystifying what was once regarded as an arcane academic approach to verification. Last week I attended another Decoding Formal Club forum and, as usual, was impressed by the depth of the presentations. Since formal is always a popular topic among readers of The Breker Trekker, I’m going to share a few highlights from that afternoon.
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Tags: Accellera, ARM, assertions, Breker, Broadcom, cache coherency, constraints, EDA, formal, functional verification, graph-based verification, NVIDIA, oski, portable stimulus, properties, scenario model, SoC verification, standards, Trek, TrekApp, TrekSoC
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Friday, October 16th, 2015
We’re coming up to the two-and-a-half-year anniversary for The Breker Trekker, with 124 published posts. Initially I promised a post every other week, but after looking at the viewing patterns I quickly realized that I had to publish every week to establish a consistent audience. There’s always something to talk about in this fast-paced world, whether something new at Breker, standards activity, observations about the EDA industry, or analysis of the customers who drive our business.
Today I’d to acknowledge a second Breker blog that has actually been around longer than this one. Just over three years ago, Breker board of directors member Michel Courtoy started a series of posts in Electronic Engineering Times to offer advice to startups. He has published 28 such posts, and has covered an amazing amount of territory. I suppose that I should have done some “cross-promotion” earlier, but at this point I would like to highlight some of Michel’s sage advice. (more…)
Tags: Breker, EDA, EE Times, Electronic Engineering Times, functional verification, graph, graph-based, Michel Courtoy, portable stimulus, realistic use case, scenario model, simulation, SoC verification, software, software-driven verification, startups, test generator
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Wednesday, October 7th, 2015
Earlier this year, we published an analysis of the semiconductor landscape that became one of the most-read posts in the history of The Breker Trekker. That’s not too surprising, since business topics tend to have wider appeal than detailed discussions about verification techniques. That post focused on the top 20 semiconductor companies and the many changes in that list over the last 15 years. We mentioned a number of noteworthy mergers, acquisitions, and spin-outs that contributed significantly to the dynamic nature of the market.
The first three quarters of this year have seen a huge uptick in merger and acquisition (M&A) activity among semiconductor companies. Although many of these deals have involved second-tier players, at least a few are significant enough to result in changes to the next Top 20 listing. Since we follow the chip industry closely, we thought we’d summarize some of the recent announcements and speculate a bit on what it all means.
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Tags: Altera, Avago, Breker, Broadcom, chip, EDA, EZchip, Freescale, functional verification, Hynix, IC Insights, IHS, Intel, Internet of Things, IoT, iSuppli, LSI, Marvell, MediaTek, Mellanox, mentor, Micro, Micron, MStar, NVIDIA, NXP, PLX, PMC-Sierra, Qualcomm, Renesas, semiconductor, Skyworks, SoC, SoC verification, Top 20
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Friday, October 2nd, 2015
Anyone who has followed Breker for any length of time knows that our key technology is the ability to generate both Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) testbench transactions and C test cases running on SoC embedded processors automatically from graph-based scenario models. Yes, that’s a long sentence but it’s most of the “elevator pitch” that we might deliver to a potential investor or to a visitor at a trade show booth asking what we do.
For the purposes of today’s post, note that graphs are the root of the solution we provide. Ten years ago, when we first began talking about the idea of graphs as the basis for functional verification of complex chip designs, we were the proverbial pioneer with arrows in our back. But many successful customer engagements and the ever-rising need for better verification have validated our position. Graphs are clearly the “next big thing” in verification and we’d like to explain why.
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Tags: Accellera, Breker, Cadence, EDA, functional verification, graph, graph-based, horizontal reuse, mentor, portable stimulus, PSWG, randomization, scenario model, scheduling, simulation, SoC verification, test generator, Universal Verification Methodology, uvm, vertical reuse, VIP
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Wednesday, September 23rd, 2015
Anyone who reads The Breker Trekker from time to time needs no convincing from me that verification is a huge challenge for today’s complex chips. Breker’s Trek family of products exists, along with dozens if not hundreds of other EDA products, specifically to address functional verification. There are more technologies, tools, platforms, libraries, and methodologies than any one verification engineer can possibly learn and use on a day-to-day basis.
Why this diversity of solutions? As I first observed in Electronic Engineering Times nearly a decade ago, there is no silver bullet for verification. The problem is both so broad and so deep that no single tool or technology will ever satisfy the need. It takes a mix of solutions, guided by methodologies, to have any chance of first-silicon success. Low-power verification is an area where this is especially true, and unfortunately there is no silver bullet to be found here either.
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Tags: 1801, Accellera, ARM, Breker, Common Power Format, CPF, DV, EDA, emulation, formal analysis, functional verification, graph, graph-based, mentor, portable stimulus, scenario model, simulation, SoC verification, standards, Synopsys, test generation, TrekSoC, TrekSoC-Si, Unified Power Format, UPF, use cases
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Wednesday, September 16th, 2015
Last week, we discussed the details of a noteworthy press release that we issued with Cadence and Mentor Graphics announcing a joint contribution to the Portable Stimulus Working Group (PSWG) of Accellera Systems Initiative. As we expected, this release stirred up a lot of interest in portable stimulus. The timing was perfect, both because of today’s deadline for contributions to the PSWG and because of last week’s DVCon India conference. I’d like to provide some updates on both activities.
First of all, the three companies did upload our joint contribution document to the PSWG internal Web site today in time for the deadline. Please note that, as per the rules for Accellera and most other standards groups, working documents are not available to the general public. If you’d like to see the contribution and follow the evolution of the standard, please consider joining the PSWG. If your company is not yet a member of Accellera, then please alert your standards manager to the benefits of participation.
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Tags: Accellera, Breker, Cadence, DVCon India, EDA, functional verification, graph, graph-based, horizontal reuse, mentor, portable stimulus, PSWG, randomization, scenario model, scheduling, simulation, SoC verification, SystemVerilog, test generator, Universal Verification Methodology, uvm, vertical reuse, VIP
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Tuesday, September 8th, 2015
This morning, Breker issued a press release with Cadence and Mentor Graphics announcing a joint contribution to the Portable Stimulus Working Group (PSWG) of Accellera Systems Initiative. We expect that this news may be surprising to much of the EDA world, so we’d like to take today’s post on The Breker Trekker to fill in some background and offer you the opportunity to ask questions. Please note that we are speaking only for Breker in this post although we doubtless share many opinions with our co-contributors.
Let’s start with a quick summary of how Accellera works so that all readers understand the context for this major contribution. The portable stimulus effort started with a Proposed Working Group last year that assessed the interest in a standard and defined a set of more than 100 requirements that such a standard would have to satisfy. Accellera approved the formation of the PSWG and we began meeting in March of this year. We have refined the requirements list and also developed a set of “use cases” showing the sort of real-world verification problems that a standard would have to address.
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Tags: Accellera, Breker, Cadence, EDA, functional verification, graph, graph-based, horizontal reuse, IEEE, mentor, portable stimulus, PSWG, randomization, scenario model, scheduling, simulation, SoC verification, subsystem, SystemVerilog, test, test generator, Universal Verification Methodology, uvm, vertical reuse, VIP
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Wednesday, September 2nd, 2015
A month ago, our blog post on The Breker Trekker concerned life on the hardware-software frontier. We discussed the ever-shifting line between hardware and software and how we at Breker seem to be straddling that line as we generate embedded C/C++ test cases for hardware verification. Yesterday we published an article on the ongoing merger between the worlds of embedded systems and EDA. We made a number of observations about how the two industries are drawing closer together.
We didn’t talk about Breker in yesterday’s article, but today we’d like to connect these two threads and talk about how we are now straddling the increasingly fuzzy line between embedded and EDA verification. This is a topic we’ve discussed internally from time to time, and we have taken some steps into the embedded world by exhibiting at ARM TechCon and publishing articles in magazine and on sites geared toward embedded designers and programmers.
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Tags: Accellera, Breker, device driver, EDA, embedded systems, functional verification, graph, graph-based, hardware, hardware-dependent software, HdS, portable stimulus, PSWG, realistic use case, scenario model, simulation, SoC verification, software, software-driven verification, test generator, use case
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