In a great moment of situational irony, I was at my laptop intensely researching details of ISO 26262 in preparation for writing a blog about a recent conversation with OneSpin’s Dave Kelf when there was a shout from the kitchen: “The dishwasher’s smoking!”

I jumped up and ran to the kitchen. “It’s just steam,” I mocked, and opened the dishwasher door to prove my point. Lots of steam.

When I re-closed the door, however, the dishwasher did not start back up. The buttons atop the door wouldn’t take any input commands. Reaching under the sink, I unplugged the dishwasher and plugged it back in. Rebooted, the dishwasher now accepted the Start command, and I returned to my study to work further on ISO 26262.

“It’s still smoking!” someone yelled from the kitchen.

Again I jumped up and ran to the kitchen, jerked opened the dishwasher door and yep, it was indeed burning, internally.

Rancid smoke was coming up out of the vent holes at the top of the door, just adjacent to the cycle-select buttons. Reaching under the sink one more time, I quickly unplugged the dishwasher and then went to get a screwdriver.

It’s good to know another EDA startup has emerged, they’ve been in such short supply of late.

Austin-based Austemper Design Systems is an EDA startup focused on functional safety that had the good luck to find the Design Automation Conference in their own front yard this year – making it easy for the company to exhibit in Austin and showcase their newly announced suite of tools.

Speaking by phone in a recent call, Austemper Founder & CEO Sanjay Pillay said, “We offer four different tools in our suite, one that analyzes quantitative metrics, two for design automation that go in and add diagnostic conversions and can be used for a single block of IP or for the entire design, and a fourth tool that runs fault-injection analysis.”

Given that the company has only been underway since March 2015, I suggested that tool portfolio represents a lot of productivity over a short amount of time.

Pillay agreed: “Although we are young, we are already working with the largest semiconductor companies in the world, and in the process of negotiating licenses with others.

“DAC was a great place to announce our products. We had more than 30 meetings and demonstrations with potential customers and partners during DAC. It was also an opportunity for us to meet in person with people we have interacted with over e-mails and conference calls, to make that human connection.”

Last year, Texas-based Concertal Systems came to DAC, but only as an observer. This year, the 15-month-old startup actually exhibited at the conference and, per reports, gave a pitch-perfect debut of their newly announced offerings: A suite of web-based tools – Audition, Orchestrate, Rehearse – which the company says effectively solves many of the problems associated with SDA, system design automation.

Per Concertal Founder and CEO Bob Ledzius, the automation of modern system design is completely dependent on the ability to seek out, vet, and integrate IP. But that process has been stalled, until now.

“A lot of people have been promising these capabilities,” Ledzius said during our recent phone call, “but we’re actually delivering on the promise with our SDA methodology.

“A lot of people have been doing great stuff to solve the incremental problems around system design, but we started by asking the right questions, not just the incremental ones. We took a step back and said, if you want the ability to develop designs in minutes – not months – then you need to develop a system for high-level IP reuse.

“Starting from this point of view, we came up with specific conclusions and solved the problem of IP verification and integration.”