EDA – Page 2 – Observations from Uppsala

DVCon Europe 2021 – Testbenches, AI, and Open Source

Just like in 2020, the Design and Verification Conference (DVCon) Europe 2021 was a virtual conference. It took place from October 26 to 27, with the SystemC Evolution day on October 28 (as usual). As has been the case in recent years, the verification side of the conference is significantly larger than the design side. This is common with the other DVCon conferences in the world. In this blog, I will go through my main observations from DVCon Europe, and share some notes from some of the presentations.

Presenting a Simics Tutorial at DVCon Europe (2021)

DVCon Europe is coming up in late October. This year, I am going to present a tutorial on using the public release of the Intel Simics Simulator to model a PCIe-attached accelerator subsystem. It is fun to be back speaking at the DVCon, after a couple of years of not having talked at the conference. DVCon Europe is a virtual event this year too due to Covid.

The SAMOS XXI Conference (Virtual)

The International Conference on Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, Modeling and Simulation (SAMOS) XXI conference took place a couple of weeks ago. Like all other events in the past 18 months, it was virtual due to Covid-19. For more on the background on the SAMOS conference, see my blog post about SAMOS XIX (from 2019). This year, I presented a tutorial about our public release of the Simics simulator and took the chance to listen to most of the other conference talks.

DVCon Europe 2020 – Developing Hardware like Software?

The Design and Verification Conference Europe (DVCon Europe) took place back in late October 2020. In a normal year, we would add “in München, Germany” to the end of that sentence. But that is not how things were done in 2020. Instead, it was a virtual conference with world-wide attendance. Here are my notes on what I found the most interesting from the conference (for various reasons, this text did come out with a bit of delay).

The Virtual DAC 2020

I have attended the Design Automation Conference (DAC) occasionally for the past decade – maybe every second or third year. The DAC is typically mostly about the lower levels and the backend of hardware design, but there is always something to learn about virtual platforms and related topics closer to my interests. This year, like last year, I got a presentation (and poster) accepted for the Designer track. The DAC organizers held out hope for a physical conference for quite a while (back in early March it seemed rather unlikely that this would still be with us in July…). However, a physical conference was not to be, and the DAC switched to a virtual format in early May.

DAC 2019 – Cloud, a Book, an Award, and More

Last week was spent at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Las Vegas. I had a presentation and poster in the Designer/IP track about Clouds, Containers, and Virtual Platforms , and worked in the Intel Simulation Solutions booth at the show floor. The DAC was good as always, meeting many old friends in the industry as well as checking out the latest trends in EDA (hint: same trends as everywhere else). One particularly nice surprise was a book (the printed type, not the Vegas “book” that means something else entirely).

Shifting Left Together at the Embedded World 2019

The Embedded World Exhibition and Conference 2019 is coming up in the last week of February. I will be there presenting a paper in the conference as well as demoing CoFluent in the Intel booth and some other miscellany. The paper “Shifting-Left Together – Enabling the Ecosystem with Virtual Platforms” is about how silicon vendors can (should) use virtual platforms to bring shift-left practices to their customers in addition to their own internal teams.

DVCon Europe 2018 / A Few Cool Papers

DVCon Europe took place in München, Bayern, Germany, on October 24 and 25, 2018. Here are some notes from the conference, including both general observations and some details on a few papers that were really quite interesting. This is not intended as an exhaustive replay, just my personal notes on what I found interesting.

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Talking Checkpointing in SystemC at the SystemC Evolution Day 2017

inThere will be a session on checkpointing in SystemC at the upcoming SystemC Evolution Day in München on October 18, 2017. I will be presenting it, together with some colleagues from Intel. Checkpointing is a very interesting topic in its own right, and I have written lots about it in the past – both as a technology and it applications.

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Intel Blog Post: Getting to Small Batches in System Development using Simulation

I have posted a two-part blog post to the public Intel Developer Zone blog, about the “Small Batches Principle” and how simulation helps us achieve it for complicated hardware-software systems. I found the idea of the “small batch” a very good way to frame my thinking about what it is that simulation really brings to system development. The key idea I want to get at is this:

[…] the small batches principle: it is better to do work in small batches than big leaps. Small batches permit us to deliver results faster, with higher quality and less stress.

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Presenting about Simics and SystemC at DVCon Europe 2016

I am going to present a paper about our new SystemC Library in Simics, at the DVCon Europe conference taking place in München next month. The paper is titled “Integrating Different Types of Models into a Complete Virtual System – The Simics SystemC* Library”, and I authored it together with my Intel colleagues Andreas Hedström, Xiuliang Wang, and Håkan Zeffer.

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Prototypical – Good [Book | PR | Reading]

Prototypical cover front I was at the DAC 2016 conference and exhibition in Austin, Texas, a few weeks ago. On the show floor, going by the S2C booth, I was roped in and got a paper copy of the book Prototypical. The copy was even signed by the authors Daniel Nenni and Don Dingee! Nice touch! The book is more than just marketing material – it provides a good overview of the origins and history of FPGA prototyping, and I found it nice and enjoyable to get more insights into this fairly important part of the EDA tools ecosystem.

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Time-Accurate Simulation Revisited – 15 years later

stopwatch A long time ago, when I was a PhD student at Uppsala University, I supervised a few Master’s students at the company CC-Systems, in some topics related to the simulation of real-time distributed computer systems for the purpose of software testing. One of the students, Magnus Nilsson, worked on a concept called “Time-Accurate Simulation”, where we annotated the source code of a program with the time it would take to execute (roughly) on the its eventual hardware platform. It was a workable idea at the time that we used for the simulation of distributed CAN systems. So, I was surprised and intrigued when I saw the same idea pop up in a paper written last year – only taken to the next level (or two) and used for detailed hardware design!
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Security for IoT Panel at the DAC 2015 – Can Security Gate your Release?

etc I had the great honor to be on a panel discussing IoT Security at the DAC back in June. The panel was part of the Embedded Techcon event that took place essentially as a little embedded corner inside the DAC – it was held in a couple of conference rooms next to the regular DAC sessions, and attendees were also mostly attending the DAC in general. Not a bad idea for meshing embedded and hardware design. The panel was a great one, and David Kleidermacher from Blackberry gave me a great take-away: unless security is allowed to gate releases of products, it is hard to think you take security seriously.

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Intel Technology Journal on Simics

Simics_ITJ_180-wide The September 2013 issue of the Intel Technology Journal (which actually arrived in December) is all about Simics. Daniel Aarno of Intel and I served as the content architects for the issue, which meant that we managed to contributed articles from various sources, and wrote an introductory article about Simics and its usage in general. It has taken a while to get this journal issue out, and now that it is done it feels just great! I am very happy about the quality of all the ten contributed articles, and reading the final versions of them actually taught me some new things you could do with Simics! I already wrote about the issue in a Wind River blog post, so in this my personal blog I want to be a little bit more, well, personal.

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