Cadence is proposing a new way to approach debug. It’s almost an obvious way, except that this isn’t how most debug has traditionally been done. The real reason this hasn’t been done before is simple: data. We’ll come back to that in a sec.

Their point is that, for most debug today, you have to anticipate where problems are likely to crop up and then manually instrument your code with “printf” statements (or the equivalent) so that you get some visibility into what’s going on … Read More → "Cadence’s Faster Debug Idea"

In a sleepy little town of 4 or 5 houses, you can be pretty informal about how mail arrives at its destinations. People can come pick it up at the post office, or the postmaster can drop it off on the way home, or whatever works. But once you get too many houses, you have to get organized: create routes and schedules and hire delivery folks to handle deliveries in a more structured manner.

That’s what’s happened with SoCs: the ad-hoc interconnect schemes of yore are giving way to networks-on-chip (NoCs) so that the complex … Read More → "Faster NoC Tuning"