tom

SAP aggressively moving customers to new database

You’ve got to hand it to SAP for competitive vision. Then take some back for how it’s explaining itself.




tom

Creating a talent pipeline for tomorrow

By 2020, more than a third of the desired core skill-sets of most occupations will be comprised of skills that are not yet considered crucial.



  • Jobs and Education

tom

Over 90% gold loan customers have not opted for moratorium: VP Nandakumar, MD and CEO, Manappuram Finance

In the gold loan category, which accounts for 87% of our standalone portfolio, more than 90% are servicing their dues.




tom

The day after tomorrow

When (and how) to end the COVID-19 lockdown has become the leading political question in every afflicted country.




tom

One on One: Rethinking CRM as Customer Engagement with Tom Libretto

Tom Libretto of Pega discusses the rapid evolution from traditional CRM to a real-time customer-centric marketing and sales environment




tom

Customers are learning to adapt to the new norm: Deb Deep Sengupta, MD, SAP Indian Subcontinent

In order to ensure business continuity during these challenging times, the German enterprise software maker SAP is actively engaged with its workforce and customers to help navigate this challenging business environment.





tom

Banks to pay compensation to customers for online banking frauds

Banks to pay Rs 1.06 crore to customers for online banking frauds




tom

How To Customise Your Car Insurance Policy?

How To Customise Your Car Insurance Policy?




tom

Customer Insight Inspires Innovation and Growth

Dr. Catherine Knupp, executive vice president and president of Research and Development at Zoetis, shares her insights on the value of innovation to both animal and human health.




tom

Zoetis to Expand BioDevice Solutions for Poultry Industry with Acquisition of Hatchery Automation Technology Leader KL Products, Inc.




tom

Zoetis Completes Acquisition of Poultry Hatchery Automation Technology Leader KL Products, Inc.




tom

Connecting with Customers in the Digital Age

Dr. Alejandro Bernal of Zoetis shares his insights on the growing importance of digital services to the success of veterinarians and livestock producers.




tom

Light Snow and 34 F at Ithaca, Ithaca Tompkins Regional Airport, NY


Winds are from the Northwest at 16.1 gusting to 21.9 MPH (14 gusting to 19 KT). The pressure is 1012.7 mb and the humidity is 59%. The wind chill is 24. Last Updated on May 9 2020, 11:56 am EDT.




tom

Ranking the bottom 10 jerseys in NBA history

We dug deep into the NBA's closet to find the jerseys that truly put the "dud" in "duds."




tom

What are those?!?! The Bottom 10 sneakers in NBA history

In fact, they're the worst of the worst.




tom

Saints' schedule 2020: Tom Brady in Week 1, Vikings on Christmas

The NFL didn’t wait long to shine a spotlight on the new Brady-Brees rivalry, but the Saints' fate could be decided by brutal late-season stretch.




tom

DAC 2015 Cadence Theater – Learn from Customers and Partners

One reason for attending the upcoming Design Automation Conference (DAC 2015) is to learn about challenges other engineers have faced, and hear about their solutions. And the best place to do that is the Cadence Theater, located at the Cadence booth (#3515). The Theater will host continuous half-hour customer and partner presentations from 10:00 am Monday, June 8, to 5:30 pm Wednesday June 4.

As of this writing, 43 presentations are scheduled. This includes 17 customer presentations, 23 partner presentations, and 3 Cadence presentations, The presentations are open to all DAC attendees and no reservations are required.

Cadence customers who will be speaking include engineers from AMD, ams, Allegro Micro, Broadcom, IBM, Netspeed, NVidia, Renesas, Socionet, and STMicroelectronics. Partner presentations will be provided by ARM, Cliosoft, Dini Group, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Methodics, Methods2Business, National Instruments, Samsung, TowerJazz, TSMC, and X-Fab.

These informal presentations are given in an interactive setting with an opportunity for questions and answers. Audio recordings with slides will be available at the Cadence web site after DAC. To access recordings of the 2014 DAC Theater presentations, click here.

 

This Cadence DAC Theater presentation drew a large audience at DAC 2015

Here’s a listing of the currently scheduled Cadence DAC Theater presentations. The latest schedule is available at the Cadence DAC 2015 site.

Monday, June 8

 

Tuesday, June 9

 

Wednesday, June 10

 

In a Wednesday session (June 10, 10:00 am) at the theater, the Cadence Academic Network will sponsor three talks on academic/industry collaboration models. Speakers are Dr. Zhou Li, architect, Cadence; Prof. Xin Li, Carnegie-Mellon University; and Prof. Laleh Behjat, University of Calgary.

As shown above, there will be a giveaways for a set of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, an iPad Mini, and a GoPro Hero3 video camera.

See the Cadence Theater schedule for further details. And be sure to view our Multimedia Site for live blogging and photos and videos from DAC. For a complete overview of Cadence activities at DAC, see our DAC microsite.

Richard Goering

Related Blog Posts

DAC 2015: See the Latest in Semiconductor IP at “IPTalks!”

Cadence DAC 2015 and Denali Party Update

DAC 2015: Tackling Tough Design Problems Head On




tom

DAC 2015: Jim Hogan Warns of “Looming Crisis” in Automotive Electronics

EDA investor and former executive Jim Hogan is optimistic about automotive electronics, but he has some concerns as well. At the recent Design Automation Conference (DAC 2015), he delivered a speech titled “The Looming Quality, Reliability, and Safety Crisis in Automotive Electronics...Why is it and what can we do to avoid it?"

Hogan gave the keynote speech for IP Talks!, a series of over 30 half-hour presentations located at the ChipEstimate.com booth. Presenters included ARM, Cadence, eSilicon, Kilopass, Sidense, SilabTech, Sonics, Synopsys, True Circuits, and TSMC. Held in an informal setting, the talks addressed the challenges faced by SoC design teams and showed how the latest developments in semiconductor IP can contribute to design success.

Jim Hogan delivers keynote speech at DAC 2015 IP Talks!

Hogan talked about several phases of automotive electronics. These include assisted driving to avoid collisions, controlled automation of isolated tasks such as parallel parking, and, finally, fully autonomous vehicles, which Hogan expects to see in 15 to 20 years. The top immediate priorities for automotive electronics designers, he said, will be government regulation, fuel economy, advanced safety, and infotainment.

More Code than a Boeing 777

According to Hogan, today’s automobiles use 50-100 microcontrollers per car, resulting in a worldwide automotive semiconductor market of around $40 billion. The global market for advanced automotive electronics is expected to reach $240 billion by 2020. Software is growing faster in the automotive market than it is in smartphones. Hogan quoted a Ford vice president who observed that there are more lines of code in a Ford Fusion car than a Boeing 777 airplane.

One unique challenge for automotive electronics designers is long-term reliability. This is because a typical U.S. car stays on the road for 15 years, Hogan said. Americans are holding onto new vehicles for a record 71.4 months.

Another challenge is regulatory compliance. Aeronautics is highly regulated from manufacturing to air traffic control, and the same will probably be true of automated cars. Hogan speculated that the Department of Transportation will be the regulatory authority for autonomous cars. Today, automotive electronics providers must comply with the ISO26262 automotive functional safety specification.

So where do we go from here? “We’ve got to change our mindset,” Hogan said. “We’ve got to focus on safety and reliability and demand a different kind of engineering discipline.” You can watch Hogan’s entire presentation by clicking on the video icon below, or clicking here. You can also watch other IP Talks! videos from DAC 2015 here.

https://youtu.be/qL4kAEu-PNw

 

Richard Goering

Related Blog Posts

DAC 2015: See the Latest in Semiconductor IP at “IP Talks!”

Automotive Functional Safety Drives New Chapter in IC Verification




tom

Verilog Code to Custom IC Layout generation

Hello everyone,

I am Vinay and I am currently developing some digital circuits for my chip design for my master's thesis at University at Buffalo.

I am fairly very new to Verilog and I don't seem to follow some of the things others find very easy.

Following are the things that I want to do to which I have no clue:

1. Develop certain arithmetic functionality in Verilog

2. Generate netlist for the verilog code

3. Feed the netlist file to Cadence encounter to be able to generate Digital Circuits' layout for my chip

I can use Cadence Virtuoso and Encounter for this but I don't know the exact procedure to get this done.

Could someone please describe the detailed process for doing the things mentioned above.

Thank you.




tom

How to customize default_hdl_checks/rules in CCD conformal constraint designer

Dear all,

I am using Conformal Constraint Designer (Version 17.1) to analyse a SystemVerilog based design.

While performing default HDL checks it finds  some violations (issues) in RTL and complains (warnings, etc) about RTL checks and others.

My questions:

Is there any directive which I can add to RTL (system Verilog) so that particular line of code or signal is ignored or not checked for HDL or RTL checks.

I can set ignore rules in rule manager (gui) but it does not seems effective if code line number changes or new signals are introduced.

What is the best way to customize default_hdl_rules ?

I will be grateful for your guidance.

Thanks for your time.




tom

customizing status toolbar

Hi,

I would like to add items like length of selected metal or area also in status tool bar. I have tried below option but I am getting warning as shown below. Could you please give suggestions. 

envGetVal("layout" "statusToolbarFields")

*WARNING* envGetVal: Could not find variable 'statusToolbarFields' in tool[.partition] 'layout'

Regards,

Varsha




tom

Automotive Security in the World of Tomorrow - Part 1 of 2

Autonomous vehicles are coming. In a statistic from the U.S. Department of Transportation, about 37,000 people died in car accidents in the United States in 2018. Having safe, fully automatic vehicles could drastically reduce that number—but the trick is figuring out how to make an autonomous vehicle safe. Internet-enabled systems in cars are more common than ever, and it’s unlikely that the use of them will slow or stop—and while they provide many conveniences to a driver, they also represent another attack surface that a potential criminal could use to disable a vehicle while driving.

So—what’s being done to combat this? Green Hills Software is on the case, and they explained the landscape of security in automotive systems in a presentation given by Max Hinson in the Cadence Theater at DAC 2019. They have software embedded [FS1] in most parts of a car, and all the major OEMs use their tech. The challenge they’ve taken on is far from a simple one—between the sheer complexity of modern automotive computer systems, safety requirements like the ISO 26262 standard, and the cost to develop and deploy software, they’ve got their work cut out for them. It’s the complexity of the systems that represents the biggest challenge, though. The autonomous cars of the future have dynamic behaviors, cognitive networks, require security certification to at least ASIL-D, require cyber security like you’d have on an important regular computer system to cover for the internet-enabled systems—and all of this comes with a caveat: under current verification abilities, it’s not possible to test every test case for the autonomous system. You’d be looking at trillions of test cases to reach full coverage—not even the strongest emulation units can cover that today.

With regular cars, you could do testing with crash-test dummies, and ramming the car into walls at high speeds in a lab and studying the results. Today, though, that won’t cut it. Testing like that doesn’t see if a car has side-channel vulnerabilities in its infotainment system, or if it can tell the difference between a stop sign and a yield sign. While driving might seem simple enough to those of us that have been doing it for a long time, to a computer, the sheer number of variables is astounding. A regular person can easily filter what’s important and what’s not, but a machine learning system would have to learn all of that from scratch. Green Hills Software posits that it would take nine billion miles of driving for a machine learning system of today’s caliber to reach an average driver’s level—and for an autonomous car, “average” isn’t good enough. It has to be perfect.

A certifier for autonomous vehicles has a herculean task, then. And if that doesn’t sound hard enough, consider this: in modern machine-vision systems, something called the “single pixel hack” can be exploited to mess them up. Let’s say you have a stop sign, and a system designed to recognize that object as a stop sign. Randomly, you change one pixel of the image to a different color, and then check to see if the system still recognizes the stop sign. To a human, who knows that a stop sign is octagonal, red, and has “STOP” written in white block letters, a stop sign that’s half blue and maybe bent a bit out of shape is still, obviously, a stop sign—plus, we can use context clues to ascertain that sign at an intersection where there’s a white line on the pavement in front of our vehicle probably means we should stop. We can do this because we can process the factors that identify a stop sign “softly”—it’s okay if it’s not quite right; we know what it’s supposed to be. Having a computer do the same is much more difficult. What if the stop sign has graffiti on it? Will the system still recognize it as a stop sign? How big of an aberration needs to be present before the system no longer acknowledges the mostly-red, mostly-octagonal object that might at one point have had “stop” written on it as a stop sign? To us, a stop sign is a stop sign, even with one pixel changed—but change it in the right spot, and the computer might disagree.

The National Institute of Security and Technology tracks vulnerabilities along those lines in all sorts of systems; by their database, a major vulnerability is found in Linux every three days. And despite all our efforts to promote security, this isn’t a battle we’re winning right now—the number of vulnerabilities is increasing all the time.

Check back next time to see the other side: what does Green Hills Software propose we do about these problems? Read part 2 now.




tom

Automotive Security in the World of Tomorrow - Part 2 of 2

If you missed the first part of this series, you can find it here.

So: what does Green Hills Software propose we do?

The issue of “solving security” is, at its core, impossible—security can never be 100% assured. What we can do is make it as difficult as possible for security holes to develop. This can be done in a couple ways; one is to make small code in small packs executed by a “safing plan”—having each individual component be easier to verify goes a long way toward ensuring the security of the system. Don’t have sensors connect directly to objects—instead have them output to the safing plan first, which can establish control and ensure that nothing can be used incorrectly or in unintended ways. Make sure individual software components are sufficiently isolated to minimize the chances of a side-channel attack being viable.

What all of these practices mean, however, is that a system needs to be architected with security in mind from the very beginning. Managers need to emphasize and reward secure development right from the planning stages, or the comprehensive approach required to ensure that a system is as secure as it can be won’t come together. When something in someone else’s software breaks, pay attention—mistakes are costly, but only one person has to make it before others can learn from it and ensure it doesn’t happen again. Experts are experts for a reason—when an independent expert tells you something in your design is not secure, don’t brush them off because the fix is expensive. This is what Green Hills Software does, and it’s how they ensure that their software is secure.

Now, where does Cadence fit into all of this? Cadence has a number of certified secure offerings a user can take advantage of when planning their new designs. The Tensilica portfolio of IP is a great way to ensure basic components of your design are foolproof. As always, the Cadence Verification Suite is great for security verification in both simulation and emulation, and JasperGold platform’s formal apps are a part of that suite as well.

We are entering a new age of autonomous technology, and with that new age we have to update our security measures to match. It’s not good enough to “patch up” security at the end—security needs to beat the forefront of a verification engineer or hardware designer’s mind at all stages of development. For a lot of applications, quite literally, lives are at stake. It’s uncharted territory out there, but with Green Hills Software and Cadence’s tools and secure IP, we can ensure the safety of tomorrow.




tom

RAK Attack: Better Driver Tracing, Faster Palladium Build Time, UVM Register Map Automation

Looking to learn? There's a bunch of new RAKs (Rapid Adoption Kits) available online now!

1) Indago 19.09 Better Driver Tracing and More

Are you new to Indago and not sure where to start? Luckily, there’s a new Rapid Adoption Kit for you: the Indago 19.09 Overview RAK! This neat package contains everything you need to get your debugging started through Indago. In four short labs, plus a brief introductory lab, you’ll have all the basics of Indago 19.09 down—the Indago working environment, the SmartLog, how Indago interacts with the rest of the Cadence Verification Suite, and how Indago uses HDL driver tracing.

Lab 1 discusses the various debugging tools included in Indago and teaches you how to customize your Indago windows and environment settings. Lab 2 covers the SmartLog feature and talks about analyzing and filtering its messages to suit your needs, as well as how to interact with the waveform marker. Lab 3 is an interactive Indago debugging experience—it’ll walk you through how to use Indago and its features in an actual working environment: setting breakpoints, using simulator commands in the Indago console, toolbars, switches, and more. Lab 4 is all things HDL tracing—recording debug data, an introduction to debug assertions, waveform visualizations, driving expression analysis, and single-step driver tracing, among other things.

Interested? Check out the RAK here.

2) IXCOM MSIE: Faster Palladium Build Time

Got several testbenches you want to compile with the same DUT and tests and you want to do it fast? With IXCOM, all you have to do to compile those different testbenches is use the xrun command for each after compiling your DUT. But what exactly is IXCOM, and how does one start using it? This quick RAK can help—here, you’ll learn the basics of using MSIE features with IXCOM, complete with an example to get you started. Using MSIE can vastly improve your build times with Palladium and using IXCOM is the best way to shrink that tedious rebuild time as small as it can get. Check out this RAK here.

3)  JasperGold Control and Status Register Verification App Automates UVM Register Map Verification

New to the JasperGold Control and Status Register (CSR) Verification App for your UVM testbenches? Don’t worry; there’s a RAK for that! This eponymous RAK can get you up and running with this in no time, helping you automate your checks from UVM register map specs. With this RAK, you’ll learn the basics of the JasperGold CSR, how to use JasperGold CSR’s Proof Accelerator, and more. CSR features a model-based approach to predicting a register’s expected value, supports pipeline interfaces, all IP-XACT access policies, and it can fully model any expected register value. It also supports register aliases, read and write semantics, and separate read/write data latencies in any given field.

If this functionality sounds up your alley, you can take a look at this RAK here.




tom

BoardSurfers: Training Insights: Creating Custom Reports using ‘Extract’

You must deal with many reports in your daily life – for your health, financial accounts, credit, your child’s academic records, and the count goes on. Ever noticed that these reports contain many details, most of which you don’t wa...(read more)



  • Allegro PCB Editor

tom

BoardSurfers: Training Insights: Loading SKILL Programs Automatically

Imagine you are on a vacation with your family, and suddenly, your phone starts buzzing. You pick it up and what are you looking at is a bunch of pending, unanswered e-mails. You start recollecting the checklist you had made before taking off only to realize that you haven’t put on the automatic replies! (read more)




tom

Custom pad shape and symbol, when placed on pcb pad locations move.

Hi everybody,

I've created a symbol with custom pad shapes. Everything looks correct in the symbol editor.

And the 3d view looks correct (upside down to show placement)

But when I try to place it on the pcb the 2 "T" shaped pads aren't in the correct location.

I have the pad shape centered on the pad...

with no offset on the padstack editor.

Does anybody know how to fix this?

Thank you!




tom

help with automating adding CLP files to DRA files

Question for forum:

I’m currently working on a code to automatically add CLP files to DRA files and then add two classes called “APPROVED” and “CLP”. To do this manually you have to open a DRA file, click file import subdrawing and choose the clp file with the same name as dra. (path already set). You then set the clp to position x 0 0. And then click on Set Up > Subclasses > Package geometry and type in “Approved” and “Clp.”

So far we’ve recorded the macros in Allegro for all of these actions. The macros correspond to one specific file name and we want to apply this to numerous files. To do this we created a python program that locates all of the specified CLP and DRA files, and if they have a matching name, runs a for loop that puts each file name into a stored variable that runs a loop for each file. We converted this script into batch and then added a function that we thought would run Allegro macros from batch.

In order to get the script working, we need to have an allegro batch command that will run the script without opening the Allegro start popup, or closing the popup when it appears.  We need to do this to run any script from starting Allegro.

I’ve done another similar program in batch where I made a for loop for each dra file and within the loop there was a batch a2dxf command that converted all dra files to dxf files. Is there a similar batch command for adding clp files to position 0 0 and/ or adding classes? If anyone has done something similar please let me know!

Thank you very much for the help.

Jen




tom

Automatically Reusing an SoC Testbench in AMS IP Verification

The complexity and size of mixed-signal designs in wireless, power management, automotive, and other fast growing applications requires continued advancements in a mixed-signal verification methodology. An SoC, in these fast growing applications, incorporates a large number of analog and mixed-signal (AMS) blocks/IPs, some acquired from IP providers, some designed, often concurrently. AMS IP must be verified independently, but this is not sufficient to ensure an SoC will function properly and all scenarios of interaction among many different AMS IP blocks at full chip / SoC level must be verified thoroughly. To reduce an overall verification cycle, AMS IP and SoC verification teams must work in parallel from early stages of the design. Easier said than done! We will outline a methodology than can help.

AMS designers verify their IP meets required specifications by running a testbench they develop for standalone / out of-context verification. Typically, an AMS IP as analog-centric, hierarchal design in schematic, composed of blocks represented by transistor, HDL and behavioral description verified in Virtuoso® Analog Design Environment (ADE) using Spectre AMS Designer simulation. An SoC verification team typically uses UVM SystemVerilog testbech at full chip level where the AMS IP is represented with a simple digital or real number model running Xcelium /DMS simulation from the command line.

Ideally, AMS designers should also verify AMS IP function properly in the context of full-chip integration, but reproducing an often complex UVM SystemVerilog testbench and bringing over top-level design description to an analog-centric environment is not a simple task.

Last year, Cadence partnered with Infineon on a project with a goal to automate the reuse of a top-level testbench in AMS verification. The automation enabled AMS verification engineers to automatically configure setup for verification runs by assembling all necessary options and files from the AMS IP Virtuoso GUI and digital SoC top-level command line configurations. The benefits of this method were:

  • AMS verification engineers did not need to re-create complex stimuli representing interaction of their IP at the top level
  • Top-level verification stays external to the AMS IP verification environment and continues to be managed by the SoC verification team, but can be reused by the AMS IP team without manual overhead
  • AMS IP is verified in-context and any inconsistencies are detected earlier in the verification process
  • Improved productivity and overall verification time

For more details, please see Infineon’s CDNLlive presentation.




tom

Virtuosity: Device Arrays in the Automated Device Placement and Routing Flow

Since the release of the Automated Device Placement and Routing solution last year, we have continued to improve and build upon it. In this blog, I’ll talk about the latest addition—the Auto Device Array form—how this is an integral piece of the new Automated Device Placement and Routing solution.(read more)







tom

Apache Vulnerabilities Spotted In OpenWhisk And Tomcat






tom

Windows OLE Automation Array Remote Code Execution

This Metasploit module exploits the Windows OLE automation array remote code execution vulnerability. The vulnerability exists in Internet Explorer 3.0 until version 11 within Windows 95 up to Windows 10.





tom

Avaya IP Office Customer Call Reporter Command Execution

This Metasploit module exploits an authentication bypass vulnerability on Avaya IP Office Customer Call Reporter, which allows a remote user to upload arbitrary files through the ImageUpload.ashx component. It can be abused to upload and execute arbitrary ASP .NET code. The vulnerability has been tested successfully on Avaya IP Office Customer Call Reporter 7.0.4.2 and 8.0.8.15 on Windows 2003 SP2.







tom

IBM Warns Of Malware On USB Drives Shipped To Customers





tom

Apache Tomcat AJP Ghostcat File Read / Inclusion

Apache Tomcat AJP Ghostcat file read and inclusion exploit.




tom

Cisco Warns Customers Of Critical Flaws, Including Struts




tom

Tesla Autopilot Duped By Phantom Images