Articles – Page 504

June 16, 2009

This article has been in production for some time. It was going to be so simple: chat to two of the leading pundits on system safety and pull together a quick piece of “compare and contrast.” Just to add to the timeliness, there has been a very genteel firefight over the role of the IEC 61508 standard on the leading system safety newsgroup (http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/hise/sc_list.php), and, sadly, Air France flight 447 has disappeared, leading … Read More → "Engineering or Craft"

ZeBu™: A Unified Verification Approach for Hardware Designers and Embedded Software Developers

by Kevin Morris

June 16, 2009

Introduction

Moore’s law continues to drive both chip complexity and performance to new highs every year, and continues to stress and periodically “break” existing design flows. Fortunately for EDA users, the same shrinking geometries that make their design problems tougher are also helping to improve the performance for their EDA tools.

But when it comes to functional verification, traditionally the largest bottleneck in the design process, software-based approaches … Read More → "ZeBu™: A Unified Verification Approach for Hardware Designers and Embedded Software Developers"

Climbing the Pyramid

Saving Engineering Education

by Kevin Morris

June 16, 2009

When most of us went to engineering school, we planned to immerse ourselves in the ocean of technology. Our education started with foundations of mathematics and science, and then, like some giant tech-history-TiVo, fast-forwarded us through centuries of experience and innovation to get us to a point somewhere near the state-of-the-art at the time of our graduation.

We soon learned that our engineering degree was simply a license to learn, however. In an environment of exponential change (as evidenced by Moore’s Law), the actual technology we mastered in our educational process was probably obsolete … Read More → "Climbing the Pyramid"

Skew This!

Azuro Touts Clock Concurrent Optimization for Aggressive Nodes

by Bryon Moyer

June 9, 2009

The concept of clocking a register is pretty simple. It’s Logic Design 101 stuff. Having an entire system controlled by a uniform clock makes accessible that which would otherwise be an intractable problem. It’s like adding traffic lights downtown to keep traffic from getting completely chaotic.

A whole discipline has grown out of this very basic concept: that of synchronous design. An entire ecosystem of tools and techniques has been built around some very fundamental assumptions of how to design such circuits. And as the circuits have gotten bigger, clock tree synthesis (CTS) has … Read More → "Skew This!"

What the Hell Were They Thinking?!

by Jim Turley

June 9, 2009

Some things were just made to go together (peanut butter and jelly) and some just weren’t, (those two teenagers in the Classmates.com pop-up ads). Now the embedded industry has a new mashup: Intel and Wind River Systems. The #1 chipmaker has hooked up with the #1 embedded-software company. Is this a match made in heaven or a disaster waiting to happen?

So far, I like the deal. It draws public attention to the oft-neglected embedded market, it gives Linux a boost (possibly at the expense of Microsoft), and it underscores Intel’s commitment to embedded … Read More → "What the Hell Were They Thinking?!"

New Toys

by Dick Selwood

June 3, 2009

When you are exposed to around 40 companies presenting their latest and greatest products or philosophy, it is sometimes a little difficult to keep the b……t filter in full-on mode. On your behalf, I tried to be as cynical as possible at the Globalpress World Summit in San Francisco, trying to see through each professional presentation and slick use of PowerPoint to establish whether there was a grain of truth in its heart. (Of course all of us at Techfocus are experts in finding that grain of truth – but normally we get more than a few … Read More → "New Toys"

Visibility Enhancement Technology Confronts the Visibility Issue with Full-Chip Simulation

by Bryon Moyer

June 2, 2009

When it comes to system-on-chip verification, two trends have become painfully obvious: it is expensive and it takes too long. Consider, for example, that the most expensive parts of today’s SoC design flow are the tasks where the engineer must engage in direct manual effort or expend energy making decisions. In the case of verification, far too much time and money are wasted on tasks that don’t add value, such as trying to figure out how supposedly-correct intellectual property (IP) is actually working, debugging “dumb” errors or deciding what signals to record in … Read More → "Visibility Enhancement Technology Confronts the Visibility Issue with Full-Chip Simulation"

Dueling DFMs

Mentor and Synopsys Announce DFM Developments

by Bryon Moyer

June 2, 2009

Design For Manufacturing (DFM) was a headline darling for a while and somehow disappeared off the radar, even as debates continued as to whether all the DFM fuss was about nothing. In fact, much of what constitutes DFM, originally implemented as point tools by young upstart companies, has quietly been subsumed into mainstream flows by mainstream tool providers, thanks in part to the traditional EDA start-up/buy-up cycle.

Fundamentally, design and verification have gone from modeling the idealized results of a manufacturing process to modeling the actual manufacturing steps in much greater detail. The criticality and accuracy … Read More → "Dueling DFMs"

Dhrystone Is Dead; Long Live CoreMark!

by Jim Turley

June 2, 2009

“There are lies, damn lies, and benchmarks.” With apologies to Mark Twain (or possibly Benjamin Disraeli or maybe Henry Du Pré Labouchère), benchmarks have been used and abused ever since there have been computers. Like the question about when the first auto race was held (“as soon as the second automobile was built”), the question of who makes the fastest computer has beguiled and bedeviled engineers for ages. Now, just maybe, we may be making progress toward settling that dispute.

The bigger the computer, the bigger the benchmark. Conversely, testing … Read More → "Dhrystone Is Dead; Long Live CoreMark!"

Atmel SAM3U Boasts Screaming USB

by Jim Turley

June 2, 2009

Atmel made its name with programmable logic and nonvolatile memory, but the company is now a big supplier of microcontrollers, too. It’s one of the earliest and oldest ARM licensees, and this week the company announced an interesting new ARM-based processor chip that might move Atmel to the front of your shopping list.

The new SAM3U chip (full name: AT91SAM3U) slots in between the company’s existing ARM7-based processors (SAM7) at the low end and its ARM9-based chips (SAM9) at the higher end. Atmel’s ARM7 chips have … Read More → "Atmel SAM3U Boasts Screaming USB"

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