Computer simulation, programming, software, technology, research, and more (since 2007)
Chip design stuff
Last week I had the joy of taking a tour of the Electrum Lab in Kista, Sweden. It is a cleanroom and semiconductor fab used for research, teaching, and commercial activities. I had heard about it for a long time, but I had absolutely no idea what they were doing there. Turns out to be quite impressive and important.
Continue reading “A Visit to The Electrum Lab”
I have been a semi-regular attendee at the Design Automation Conference going back to 2008 or so, and over the years I have slowly drifted towards EDA (Electronics Design Automation). I have presented various talks as part of the “engineering track” at the DAC, always in some kind of “systems” category. This has now come to its logical conclusion, when I step up and join the Engineering Track Technical Program Committee (TPC), taking care of the Systems and Software topic. We need more systems and more software at the DAC!
Continue reading “The 0b111111 DAC –More Systems and Software”
DVCon Europe 2025 took place on October 14 and 15, with the SystemC Evolution Day on the 16th. I was there, running around talking to people, taking photos, and listening to presentations. Just like it usually is. Great conference, great fun, great learning! The conference dinner was back by popular demand, and there was a lot of virtual platforms.
Continue reading “DVCon Europe 2025 – Virtual Platforms and a Real Party”
The 62nd Design Automation Conference (DAC 62) took place in San Francisco, California, USA, from June 22 to 25, 2025. It was the first time in three years that I attended the DAC (this blog is a little bit late, sorry for that). For those that do not know, the DAC is the biggest show in EDA, combining a major research conference with an industry exhibition and engineering track. This year the theme was AI (Artificial Intelligence), and not much else.
Continue reading “DAC 2025 – All About AI”
In late May, the VLAB Works part of ASTC was acquired by Cadence, and as a result I am finally working in EDA for real. What a change! When I started working with the Simics simulator at Virtutech in 2002, we were at pains to distance ourselves from EDA. Now, almost 25 years later, I am working in one of the big three EDA companies.
Continue reading “Working in EDA for Real (Finally)”
I posted my first post on Semiwiki! It is a short summary of what we learned at DVCon Europe 2024. Semiwiki is a blog and wiki for the “semiconductor” industry – i.e., it covers topics like EDA tools, semiconductor manufacturing and fabs, hardware design, software design, testing, validation, etc.
Continue reading “DVCon Europe Report on Semiwiki”
The 2024 DVCon (Design and Verification) Europe conference took place on October 15 and 16, in its traditional location at the Holiday Inn Munich City Centre. This year there was even more talk of artificial intelligence than last year, and quite a few sessions related to virtual platforms. And lots of other interesting presentations and discussions.
Continue reading “DVCon Europe 2024 – AI and More”
The 2023 DVCon (Design and Verification) Europe conference took place on November 14 and 15, in the traditional location of the Holiday Inn Munich City Center. This was the 10th time the conference took place, serving as an excuse for a great anniversary dinner. Also new was the addition of a research track to provide academics publishing at the conference with the academic credit their work deserves. This year had a large number of papers related to virtual platforms, so writing this report has taken me longer than usual. There was just so much to cover.
Continue reading “DVCon Europe 2023 – 10th Anniversary Edition”The 2022 DVCon (Design and Verification) Europe conference was back in physical form at its usual venue at the Holiday Inn München. It was a great conference, and just like at the 2022 DAC people were very happy to be back in person.
Continue reading “DVCon Europe 2022. Verification, System Simulation, and People!”I presented a tutorial about the “verification of virtual platforms models” at DVCon Europe last week. The tutorial was prepared by me and Ola Dahl at Ericsson, but Ola unfortunately could not attend and present his part – so I had to learn his slides and style and do my best to be an Ola stand-in (tall order, we really missed you there Ola!). The title maybe did not entirely describe the contents – it was more a discussion around how to think about correctness and in particular specifications vs implementations. The best part was the animated discussion that we got going in the room, including some new insights from the audience that really added to the presented content.
Updated: Included an important point on software correctness that I forgot in the first publication.
Continue reading “Notes from our DVCon Europe 2022 Tutorial”
DVCon (Design and Verification Conference) Europe is coming up in early December, in person, in München, Germany. The selection of papers and posters is finished, and the program is firming up. I am happy to report that I am part of two items on the menu, a personal record for DVCon! For more on DVCon Europe in general and how it has been in the past, see my previous blog post on DVCon Europe 2022.
Continue reading “Two Presentations at DVCON Europe 2022”
The 59th Design Automation Conference (DAC) took place in San Francisco, July 10-14, 2022. As always, the DAC provided a great place to learn about what is going on in EDA. The DAC is really three events in one: there is an industry trade-show/exhibition, a research conference that is considered the premier in EDA, and an engineering track where practitioners present their work in a less formal setting.
I had two talks in the engineering track – one on the Intel device modeling language (which actually won the best presentation award in the embedded sub-track), and one on using simulation technology to build hardware software-first.
The DAC was almost overwhelming in the richness of people and companies, but this blog tries to summarize the most prominent observations.
Continue reading “DAC 2022 – Back in Person, Chiplets, an Award, and Much More”
The SystemC Evolution Fika on April 7 had threading/parallelism as its theme. There were four speakers who presented various angles on how to parallelize SystemC models. The presentations and following discussion provided a variety of perspectives on threading as it can be applied in virtual platforms and other computer architecture simulations. It was pretty clear that the presenters and audience had quite different ideas about just what the target domain looks like and the best way to introduce parallelism to SystemC. Here is my take on what was said.
Continue reading “SystemC Evolution Fika: Parallel SystemC”The Design and Verification Conference (DVCon) Europe is going to be in-person in München again in 2022. After two years of virtual conferences, we are going back to the Holiday Inn where we have had so many great events in the past. The conference takes place on December 6 and 7. The call for papers, tutorials, and panels is out now, with a deadline in May!
Continue reading “DVCon Europe 2022 – Come Join us in München in December”When discussing the design and integration of systems on chip and models of systems on chip, the Lego analogy is often brought up. The idea being that with Lego, anyone can put together anything and every component can be combined with all other components. Right. My recent building of Lego set 21327, Typewriter, makes me wonder if the people who talk about Lego-like construction have actually built anything from Legos in the past few decades.
