rtl – Observations from Uppsala

Notes from our DVCon Europe 2022 Tutorial

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.

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.

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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Is Cycle Accuracy a bad Idea?

In a funny coincidence, I published an article at SCDSource.com about the need for cycle-accurate models for virtual platforms on the same day that ARM announced that they were selling their cycle-accurate simulators and associated tool chain to Carbon Technology. That makes one wonder where cycle-accuracy is going, or whether it is a valid idea at all… is ARM right or am I right, or are we both right since we are talking about different things?

Let’s look at this in more detail.

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