We hear from media outlets that Internet of Things (IoT) solutions will be soon be surrounding us in our homes, our offices, our schools; in factories and farms; working to make our life better, or perhaps working to eliminate our species!  Well, 50+ years has taught us that any new technology happens first at DAC, and adding credence to the media’s predictions, you will see IoT technology information and insights everywhere the 54th Design Automation Conference.

There is not some new job title of “IoT engineer.” Instead our familiar, experienced analog, mixed-signal engineers, RF engineers, server architects and mobile developers and verification teams are applying our tools and their skills in this new application area. Since IoT design elements touch most EDA engineering disciplines, we’ve made it easier for DAC attendees to learn what they need to know about IoT trends and technology wherever they are at the Austin Convention Center.

Here’s a sampling of IoT-related presentations that can be found in keynotes, SKY Talks, fireside chats, DAC Pavilion sessions and tutorials:

There’s two kinds of conversations when it comes to electrical systems and cars. One is about the power train and the other one is about the advanced driver-assistance system, ADAS. Distinct as they may be, both of these systems can benefit from the optimizations associated with design automation, and both of these systems today are mashed up against the complexities of using third-party IP.

Chips in cars today need to manage the power train, or they need to provide safety and security for the driver – but either way, they need to work perfectly every time, all the time, and in some pretty hellish conditions. It’s hot under the hood and the road today is unforgiving. So are the lawyers.

So what’s a third-party IP provider supposed to do? Turn tail and run? Never sell into the automotive market where litigation looms larger than a sandstorm in April on the Texas Panhandle? Or try to man-up and work with the automotive market to provide IP that fits well into the chips that such customers need?

The White House this week issued an Executive Order launching a complete review of the H-1B visa program as it pertains to high-tech workers. Is this a relief for those involved in using these devices to bring in tech talent from overseas and want to get it right? Or does it harbor a deepening of what Synopsys Aart de Geus terms “a tragedy” – the ongoing difficulty of getting easy access to the global talent pool that Silicon Valley professes to need?

More fundamentally, why are there H-1B visas in the first place? Are there indeed too few American nationals with the training needed to push Silicon Valley’s tech agenda forward? And if those numbers are insufficient, why can’t the talent pool be augmented with off-shore workers laboring away in distant climes?

After all, distributed teams and remote computing have been a way-of-life for several decades here in the Digital Age. Remember all of the crowing at the dawn of the Era of the Distributed Team: Development would go on non-stop, 24×7. Wherever the sun is shining, designers are designing, was the received wisdom when it comes to global teams – and it continues to be.

So, why is it so important to bring people into the U.S. when they can work elsewhere, in their own locale – their efforts melded into the corporate whole via VPNs and/or crafty IT interventions that knit the project together seamlessly. All of that enhanced even further with the advent of The Cloud that Computes.

The semiconductor design ecosystem came out in force Thursday, April 6, for the CEO Outlook at Synopsys in Mountain View, Calif. It was a great crowd and an exceptional panel moderated by Semiconductor Engineering’s Ed Sperling. Thanks to Lip-Bu Tan of Cadence, Wally Rhines from Mentor, ARM’s Simon Segars and Aart de Geus at Synopsys for their insights and a lively discussion.

Our special guests that night were from the Dwight D. Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy, part of the National Defense University (NDU). The ESD Alliance hosts a yearly visit from the NDU students and organizes meetings with noted semiconductor companies in Silicon Valley to help educate them about our industry and its importance to the global electronics industry.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ll dispense with a long blog and let the photos tell the story.

If you’re craving words to describe the evening, Peggy Aycinena wrote a blog filled with color and loads of details on EDACafe. It can be found at: http://bit.ly/2kjVajD

From left to right: ESD Alliance Board Chair Grant Pierce of Sonics, the ESD Alliance’s Julie Rogers, Wally Rhines, Aart de Geus, Paul Cohen of the ESD Alliance and Larry Disenhof of Cadence.

Ed Sperling of Semiconductor Engineering (at left) with panel members and ESD Alliance Board Member (from left to right) Lip-Bu Tan of Cadence, Wally Rhines from Mentor Graphics, ARM’s Simon Segars and Aart de Geus of Synopsys.

All my working life, I have had a challenge with explaining to people what I actually do for a job. It all starts with defining what is an embedded system. This is by no means easy. I thought that this might become simpler over time, as embedded systems become even more ubiquitous, but the reverse is true. The definition is getting even fuzzier.

It has reached a point where software engineers do not necessarily know whether they are working on embedded systems or not …