Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Synopsys’ distinguished experts in speed adapters and in-circuit emulation (ICE). Many who know my professional background see me as an advocate for virtual, transactor-based emulation, hence I was genuinely surprised to discover the impressive results achieved by today’s speed adapters critical to the validation of system in … Read more

In the rapidly evolving domain of AI processors, performance benchmarking has become essential for distinguishing meaningful innovation from hype. The semiconductor industry is in the midst of rethinking time-honored verification strategies, a result of increasingly layered software stacks in today’s system-on-chip (SoC) designs. The answer is often real-world, application software workloads, frequently from standardized benchmarks … Read more

Over the past several years, the lion’s share of artificial intelligence (AI) investment has poured into training infrastructure—massive clusters designed to crunch through oceans of data, where speed and energy efficiency take a back seat to sheer computational scale. Training systems can afford to be slow and power-hungry; if it takes an extra day or … Read more

Introduction: The Historical Roots of Hardware-Assisted Verification The relentless pace of semiconductor innovation continues to follow an unstoppable trend: the exponential growth of transistor density within a given silicon area. This abundance of available semiconductor fabric has fueled the creativity of design teams, enabling exponentially advanced systems-on-chip (SoCs). Yet, the very scale that empowers new … Read more

My head is currently spinning like a top. I foolishly wondered how much power AI-heavy data centers are currently consuming, and how much they are expected to consume in the coming years, and now I’m sorry I asked. The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts that global electricity demand from data centers will more than double … Read more

Inference is rapidly emerging as the next major frontier in artificial intelligence (AI). Historically, the AI development and deployment focus has been overwhelmingly on training with approximately 80% of compute resources dedicated to it and only 20% to inference. That balance is shifting fast. Within the next two years, the ratio is expected to reverse … Read more

The meteoric rise of NVIDIA’s GPU technology in accelerating AI has captivated the world and, in the process, given rise to persistent myths. This article tackles 11 of the most common misconceptions about AI processors. Artificial intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm and integration of AI accelerators and processors into applications is becoming … Read more

Since the fall of the Roman Empire, France has played a defining role in shaping Western civilization. In the 9th century, Charlemagne—a Frank—united much of Europe under one rule, leaving behind a legacy so profound he is still remembered as the “Father of Europe.” While Italy ignited the Renaissance, it was 16th-century France that carried … Read more

Part 2 examines the transformation of the interface protocols industry from a fragmented market of numerous specialized vendors to a more consolidated one dominated by a few major solutions providers as driven by the increasing complexity of modern protocols. It highlights the importance of rigorous validation of interface protocols and underscores the pivotal role of … Read more

Key Takeaways Prolog – Interface Protocols: Achilles’ Heels in Today’s State-of-the-art SOCs June 30 was only a week away when Varun had a sleepless night. The call from the datacenter manager the evening before alerted him on a potential problem with the training of a new Generative AI model. Six months earlier Varun’s employer installed the … Read more