In late 2001, Nick Baker and other members of the Ultimate TV team at Microsoft learned that the company was ending development work on the product. For a still youthful engineer whose curriculum vitae already took in some ill-fated early-days video card work at Apple and the short-lived 3DO games console, Baker could have been […]
What do we mean by a ‘left shift’ in design for manufacturing (DFM) analysis? Think of it as moving the DFM analysis from a tool run by the manufacturer into an integrated solution within the printed circuit board (PCB) design system. It is a major advance in the design of PCBs, allowing users to ultimately […]
Wilf Corrigan ‘Epitaxy innovator’, ‘ASIC champion’, ‘SIA founder’. Those are a few of the descriptions you could apply to Wilf Corrigan. Another, until May, was ‘Last of the Pioneers’ – but then, after 46 years of involvement with major chip companies, Corrigan stepped down as chairman of LSI Logic, the company he set up with […]
Processor program storage today Most of the microcontrollers currently on the market store program code in one of three ways: in ROM on the same chip as the MCU; in embedded flash memory on the same chip as the MCU; or as external flash memory whose contents are downloaded to the MCU. Each of these […]
The verification of digital sub-systems is based on advanced techniques such as constraints capture, randomized or pseudo-randomized stimuli generation and results collection with functional coverage evaluation. The use of manually verified hand-coded analog block models within a digital verification environment has so far been sufficient. However, the move to greater levels of integration, shrinking process […]
More than 50% of highly complex systems-on-chip (SoCs) have functional issues at first silicon, issues that emerge after engineers have spent much time and money on verification and emulation. These issues delay time-to-ramp and cause significant losses of direct and indirect product revenue. All this demonstrates the need for efficient post-silicon debug methodologies and tools. […]
The ‘state-of-the-art’ solution for wireless transceiver RF ICs is single chip CMOS, integrating digital, analog, and RF blocks on a single chip. The architectures involved require new and challenging approaches to verification. To understand these, we first need to look back at the history of the transceiver architectures used for wireless mobile phone implementations during […]
The most expensive parts of today’s system-on-chip (SoC) design flow are where engineers must engage in direct manual effort or expend their energy making decisions. Unfortunately, far too much time and money are wasted on tasks that do not add value — such as trying to figure out if supposedly correct intellectual property (IP) is […]
The increased size and complexity of designs continues to push design and verification methodologies to progressively higher levels of abstraction. These upward shifts in abstraction tend to occur about every decade or so, and we are currently experiencing one in the shift from RTL to transaction-level modeling (TLM). Abstractions must eventually be converted back effectively […]
Up to 80% of the overall design cycle time can today be spent on verification. Constrained-random testing (CRT) was developed in response to greatly reduce the amount of code needed to create a verification environment. However, CRT-based methodologies that do not include functional coverage are analogous to shooting blind [1]. Functional coverage provides essential feedback […]
