Posts Tagged ‘mentor’
Wednesday, August 24th, 2016
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
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Tags: acceleration, Accellera, Breker, Broadcom, Cadence, coverage, debug, dvcon, DVCon India, EDA, emulation, FPGA prototyping, functional verification, graph, graph-based, Infineon, Intel, mentor, multi-SoC, multi-threaded, multiprocessor, NXP, portable stimulus, PSWG, Qualcomm, reuse, scenario model, simulation, SoC verification, software-driven verification, Synopsys, test generator, transactional, TVS, Universal Verification Methodology, UVC, uvm, VIP
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Wednesday, July 27th, 2016
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.
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Tags: acceleration, acquisition, applications, Atrenta, avant, behemoth, Breker, Cadence, corner store, coverage, debug, EDA, functional verification, jasper, M&A, major leaguer, mentor, merger, minor leaguer, portable stimulus, reuse, SoC verification, startup, Synopsys, uvm
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Thursday, July 14th, 2016
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.
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Tags: acceleration, applications, apps, bandwidth, Breker, cache coherency, Cadence, coverage, debug, EDA, emulation, FPGA prototyping, functional verification, graph, Imperas, mentor, multi-SoC, multi-threaded, multiprocessor, performance analysis, portable stimulus, reuse, scenario model, simulation, SoC verification, system coverage, transactional, TrekApp, TrekBox, TrekSoC, TrekSoC-Si, UVC, uvm
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Tuesday, July 5th, 2016
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.
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Tags: acceleration, acquisition, applications, Atrenta, avant, behemoth, Breker, Cadence, corner store, coverage, debug, EDA, functional verification, jasper, M&A, major leaguer, mentor, merger, minor leaguer, portable stimulus, reuse, SoC verification, startup, Synopsys, uvm
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Tuesday, April 26th, 2016
Ever since Accellera started the Portable Stimulus Working Group (PSWG), this emerging technology has generated a lot of buzz both within the EDA industry and among our semiconductor and systems customers. As the pioneer in this technology we get a lot of questions about what portable stimulus is, why it is different from the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) and other established approaches, and why anyone would need it.
We’ve devoted quite a few posts to this topic in The Brekker Treker blog, stretching back two years to when Accellera first set up a proposed working group (PWG) to survey the industry and decided whether standardization of portable stimulus was feasible and desirable. Given the many posts scattered throughout the past two years, we thought that we would take this opportunity to give readers new to this topic a guided tour of the information that we have available.
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Tags: Accellera, Breker, bring-up lab, C/C++, cache coherency, Cadence, Cavium, constraints, dvcon, DVCon India, EDACafe, emulation, ESL, FPGA, functional verification, graph, graph-based, mentor, multi-SoC, portable stimulus, prototyping, PSWG, scenario model, simulation, SoC validation, SoC verification, system-on-chip, SystemVerilog, test case generator, test cases
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Tuesday, April 5th, 2016
We try to cover a variety of topics here in The Breker Trekker blog, focusing on technical information but mixing in some general industry analysis as well. Two of our most popular posts of all time have involved the annual semiconductor supplier rankings from IHS, Inc. and the large amount of semiconductor industry merger and acquisition (M&A) activity over the last few years. IHS released their 2015 results yesterday, so it’s time for an update on both of these topics.
Let’s start by catching up on the M&A front. When we last covered this topic in January, the acquisition of Freescale by NXP and the acquisition of Altera by Intel had both just completed late last year. These closed in time to be reflected in the 2015 supplier rankings. There were several other deals from 2015 that were still pending and, while some of them have now closed, their effects will not be seen until the 2016 results are in.
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Tags: Altair, Altera, Apple, Avago, Breker, Broadcom, Cisco, EDA, Freescale, functional verification, Hynix, IHS, Infineon, Intel, Internet of Things, IoT, Leaba, Marvell, MediaTek, mentor, Micron, NVIDIA, NXP, ON, Qualcomm, Renesas, Samsung, SanDisk, semiconductor, Skyworks, SoC, SoC verification, Sony, STMicro, Texas Instruments, TI, Top 20, Toshiba, Western Digital
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Thursday, March 24th, 2016
Last week, we used an update on the Accellera Portable Stimulus Working Group (PSWG) presented at the Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon) as a jumping-off point to discuss the status of this standardization effort and some key aspects of the three proposals currently under consideration. We were not the only blog to cover portable stimulus topics from DVCon; Brian Bailey of SemiconductorEngineering and Bernard Murphy from SemiWiki also posted their observations.
Earlier this week, EDACafe blogger colleague Peggy Aycinena posted a thought-provoking look at PSWG and the portable stimulus challenge. In regards to the scope of the proposed standard, she noted “a distinct wow factor in all of this, it’s so comprehensive” and said “this whole effort seems massive to me.” Today we’d like to respond to Peggy’s comments and questions, noting both the challenges of a portable stimulus standard and the availability of a working solution today.
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Tags: Accellera, Breker, bring-up lab, C/C++, cache coherency, Cadence, constraints, EDACafe, emulation, ESL, FPGA, functional verification, graph, graph-based, mentor, multi-SoC, Peggy Aycinena, portable stimulus, prototyping, PSWG, scenario model, SemiconductorEngineering, SemiWIki, simulation, SoC validation, SoC verification, system-on-chip, SystemVerilog, test case generator, test cases
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Wednesday, March 16th, 2016
As all of our regular readers are aware, the software-driven SoC verification space pioneered by Breker is becoming more of a mainstream approach every day. One good barometer for the industry shift now underway is the standardization effort in progress within the Accellera Portable Stimulus Working Group (PSWG). The amount of interest in this standard has skyrocketed recently, and portable stimulus was a hot topic at the Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon) two weeks ago.
As we promised when we first began discussing the PSWG, we don’t believe in sharing internal details of standardization work in a public blog. However, the group was offered a slot to present an update at an Accellera-sponsored lunch during DVCon. So the PSWG put together a set of slides with information to share publicly and Vice-Chair Tom Fitzpatrick of Mentor did a nice job of presenting them. For those of you who could not attend, we’ll summarize the current status in today’s blog post.
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Tags: Accellera, Breker, bring-up lab, C/C++, cache coherency, Cadence, constraints, dvcon, emulation, ESL, FPGA, functional verification, graph, graph-based, mentor, multi-SoC, node coverage, portable stimulus, prototyping, PSWG, realistic use case, scenario model, simulation, SoC validation, SoC verification, system-on-chip, SystemVerilog, test case generator, test cases, use-case coverage, vayavya
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Wednesday, March 9th, 2016
In last week’s post on The Breker Trekker we summarized activities at the Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon) in San Jose, including a brief mention of the “Redefining ESL” panel on Wednesday morning. I attended this session and took detailed notes in anticipation of blogging about it, but in the process gave some thought to my own opinions about the electronic system-level (ESL) domain and how they intersect with those of the panel participants.
The panel was organized by Dave Kelf of OneSpin Solutions and PR guru Nanette Collins, and moderated by Brian Bailey of SemiconductorEngineering. Brian is a long-time observer of the ESL market so I expected him to ask some tough questions. He opened by remarking that the term is generally credited to the late EDA analyst Gary Smith. Many of us who knew Gary sometimes teased him a bit on his regular pronouncements that “this will be the year of ESL.”
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Tags: Accellera, application, Breker, bring-up lab, Cadence, dvcon, emulation, ESL, FPGA, functional verification, graph, high-level synthesis, HLS, Imperas, mentor, node coverage, OneSpin, portable stimulus, prototyping, PSWG, realistic use case, scenario model, simulation, SoC validation, SoC verification, Synopsys, system-on-chip, test case generator, test cases, Universal Verification Methodology, use-case coverage, uvm, virtual platform, virtual prototype
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Thursday, March 3rd, 2016
We’ve just returned from our most important trade show of the year: the Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon) in San Jose. Sure, DAC is a bigger show, but it covers all of EDA and so lacks the front-end digital focus of DVCon. We previewed the event over our last few blog posts and today we’d like to summarize what happened and make a prediction or two about how this particular DVCon will affect the industry.
The biggest news for us was that portable stimulus seemed to be on everyone’s lips this year. Many of the engineers who stopped by to visit our booth had heard the term and were aware that the Accellera Portable Stimulus Working Group (PSWG) is developing a standard. If they didn’t know what portable stimulus was, they almost surely knew by the end of the show.
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Tags: Accellera, application, Breker, bring-up lab, cache coherency, Cadence, Cavium, dvcon, emulation, ESL, FPGA, functional verification, graph, graph-based, mentor, multi-SoC, node coverage, path coverage, portable stimulus, prototyping, PSWG, realistic use case, scenario model, simulation, SoC validation, SoC verification, system-on-chip, test case generator, test cases, TrekApp, TrekSoC-Si, Universal Verification Methodology, use-case coverage, uvm
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