The ESD Alliance has a new look with a refreshed website, thanks to our tenacious Member of the Technical Staff Paul Cohen who oversaw the entire project.

And, what a project it was! The design streamlines our activities, all found in neatly packaged pull-down sections running across the top right of the home page. You’ll find information about us, including the staff, board of directors, committees and member companies. Our active initiatives provide the forum for member companies to address issues of common concern and fall broadly into five categories –– risk management, growth and efficiency, industry voice, events and education, and market information. All are outlined in detail and we invite participation from member companies. Naturally, we have a section on news and events that hosts our newsletters and my blog. More content is being added regularly. Please let Paul (paul@esd-alliance.org) or me (bob@esd-alliance.org) know what you think.

Of course, the next event is the Design Automation Conference (DAC), the premier conference for design and automation of electronic systems, long sponsored by the ESD Alliance. DAC is being held this year at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas.We’ll be in booth #2123 Monday-Wednesday, June 19-21, from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m.

Please stop by our booth to see us. We’ll have our latest newsletter and other handouts. And, make sure you visit our member companies’ DAC booths as well. By all means, tell them I sent you!

This conversation with Hal Barbour, Chairman at CAST IP, is the second of four dialogs about Grand Challenges in IP.

The first installment in the series, published last week, was a conversation with Sonics co-Founder and CEO Grant Pierce.

Pierce argues that today’s Grand Challenges in IP center around the complexities of delivering sub-systems and related technical expertise to customers, helping develop edge-node devices targeted at Machine Learning, and providing IP for myriad automotive systems – all while meeting demands for greater bandwidth and throughput, and astonishingly low power.

In this week’s installment in the series, Hal Barbour talks about a completely different set of Grand Challenges in IP – those related to the business issues surrounding the industry.

The creation of the Portable Stimulus standard has raised a number of issues about the tradeoffs between using an industry standard language and a domain-specific language. Several blogs have tried to make the case for one or the other and often use scare tactics to make one look better than the other. That is not the objective of this blog. Instead, it’s meant to provide some information as to why the inclusion of the C++ variant is a good thing for the industry.