Prakash Narain is a long-standing member of the EDA community, having helped found Real Intent in 1999. In August 2016, I interviewed Dr. Narain at length about the technology at the core of the company. This week we spoke again, starting with an update of the company’s announcements around DAC in June, which involve further advancements in clock-domain crossing analysis and sign-off.
Real Intent must be doing something right, because Narain seems as enthused about the prospects for his company as someone who has just launched a tech start-up. It takes stamina and courage to sustain that optimism, and market success. Narain says his organization has both.
In a unique new partnership between the ESD Alliance and San Jose State University, SJSU alum and legendary EDA VC Jim Hogan will be speaking on campus this coming Wednesday evening, September 20th, at 7:00 pm.
Hogan’s topic is revolutionary, the Cognitive Era, and the official message behind his talk is all things bright and beautiful:
“Cognitive science is a diverse field which is unified and motivated by a single basic inquiry: How does my education, career and life change in the Cognitive Era? How do people, animals or computers ‘think,’ act and learn? To understand the mind and brain, cognitive science brings together methods and discoveries from neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, philosophy and data/computer science.”
The unofficial message, however, ain’t so cheery. That’s because we already know how people think, act and learn. They do it all around us all the time, and so do we. We don’t need the sciences of neurology, psychology, linguology, philology, or digital-ology to explain it to us.
What we do need is for those disciplines to protect us from all that science and engineering has produced, the stuff that’s now overwhelming our sense of wholeness and health, sanity and serenity.
Imagine traveling back in the time to the early human ages. It’s going to be both scary and interesting when you meet a person who probably cannot speak or if they do you won’t be able to understand them. Clearly, communication will not be possible until you find a mutual way to convey your respective meanings/intentions. The same principle applies in the world of electronics as there are various types of interfaces among electronic devices. Therefore, a standard communication protocol eases the transformation of data in a system, especially in a System-on-Chip (SoC) system which consists of different systems.
SoC FPGAs such as Xilinx® Zynq™ establishes the ARM Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA) as the on-chip interconnection standard to connect and manage the functional blocks within the SoC design. The Advanced eXtensible Interface (AXI) is designed for FPGAs based on AMBA as a protocol for communication between blocks of IP.
When people talk about the Portable Stimulus Standard (“PSS”) they throw around the term “graph based” as if that somehow clarifies everything. They usually don’t bother to describe what it means, beyond it being some simple mathematical model. Some vendors even confuse it with the term “graphical”. To simplify this confusion, for this blog we will use the term “visual”. This blog will answer questions about how PSS relates to graphs and how those graphs relate to other similar graph-based models already used within the industry.
