Welcome to the new “EDACafe Weekly.”   Every Monday you will be receiving a summary of the previous weeks EDACafe blog postings, including our featured writer Peggy Aycinena.   There will be postings from my blogs: Video Roundup, The Dominion of Design and IP Showcase, that cover the various facets of creating new electronic designs.  And of course, all the other blog contributors from the past week.

We look forward to hearing your comments about the new format….and let me know if you would like to start a blog on EDACafe.

+Graham

Click Here to see what the CEO and Executives said in 2011.  Were they right?

I was doing video interviews at DesignCon 2012 in Santa Clara last week.   The event was busy with lots of attendees and presentations.  You can enjoy over 20 interviews covering all the advancements in high-frequency IC, board and system design at the following page:

DesignCon 2012 Video Interviews

I also took the time to walk the show floor and take photos of various booths and attendees at the event.  You can enjoy the gallery below.

Happy Valentines Day!

+Graham

As 2012 begins, it is time to review the stories and weekly articles that were picked by you, the EDACafe.com audience, as the most interesting and newsworthy.   We have grouped them by the highest number of click-throughs or readers.

The EDA Weekly Magazine covered many different technology and business topics.  The top Magazine article of 2011 was an analysis of SpringSoft, written by Russ Henke.

EDACafe has also been tracking Press Coverage throughout the year.  The leading articles were a mix of customer wins, acquisition announcements and business reports, with Tanner EDA topping the list.  Here are the most newsworthy corporate stories for 2011:

In the IC News category the following were the top 5 stories:

Careers Cafe authored by Mark Gilbert was also a regular feature.  The following article published on Feb. 17, 2011, received an amazing 6,647 click-throughs:

So what has changed in EDA hiring?… Is my wild prediction coming true?… How might Mentor play …

The staff of Internet Business Systems and EDACafe.com thank you for your readership and wish you a prosperous 2012!

Synopsys hosted the 24th EDA Interoperability Foum on Nov. 30 and I had the pleasure to attend the event.   We listed to keynote speakers who highlighted what has changed in the last decade and what are the next challenges to be taken on.  I interviewed Rich Goldman VP, Corporate Marketing and Strategic Alliances, who gave his  summary of the event and the highlights from the keynote speakers. You can listen to it here.

I also took some photos which you can see below.

Yatin Trivedi also spoke with Rich for a recap of the event.  You can see the video here:

+Graham

Don’t miss Mark Gilberts’ latest column for Careers Corner and More.  You will enjoy reading Mark’s thoughts on moving your career forward even as we near this time of the rolling year.  You can see his thoughts and recommendations here.

Happy Thanksgiving!

+Graham

I was at International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) at the DoubleTree Hotel in San Jose this week and spoke with the General Chair, Joel Phillips about what is trending for the event.   You can listen to the interview here.

I also took some photos which you can see below.

Enjoy!

+Graham

I have a Computer Science degree from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada which I received in 1984.  Today,  I am no longer doing software development or engineering work.   In the area of Computer Science, there are many talented and hardworking academics who continue to advance the state of the art.  One of those is Reiner Hartenstein, Professor of Computer Science, at the Technical University of  Kaiserslautern on Germany.

I have never met Dr. Hartenstein, but I became acquainted with his work by chance.   I am on Mentor Graphics’ email list for the various events and seminars they offer throughout the year.  For some reason, the emails are addressed to Reiner Hartenstein (...Dear Reiner Hartenstein,  Please come to….).    I have made several attempts to have Mentor rectify the error, but to date I have not been successful.

Since Mentor had pointed out Reiner to me, I decided to do some digging with my favorite search engine and I was quickly led to  Dr. Hartenstein.   He is a professor at the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany, and was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley. He is a consultant and expert in EDA tools, creator of the language KARL hardware and a pioneer in VHDL and Verilog languages. He has numerous awards including being an IEEE Fellow, and has published 14 books and over 400 technical articles, and has given over 200 lectures worldwide.

Dr. Hartenstein is focused on the important area of Reconfigurable Computing (RC), typically done with FPGAs.  The reason the area is important is because of the tremendous energy savings that are possible over traditional von Neumann, CPU-based computing.   For some programming tasks,  FPGA systems can reduce energy consumption by 3,000 times according to Dr. Hartenstein.  One of the challenges for the introduction and adoption of RC is education:  there is a lack of tools and methods that can be used in colleges and universities to teach effective RC.

You can learn more about Dr. Hartenstein and his research here:

Personal Website

The von Neumann Syndrome

What are your thoughts on alternatives to traditional computing approaches?  Will we ever be effective in programming large numbers of reconfigurable datastream engines? Let me know your thoughts, below.

+Graham

Oct. 25 at the Santa Clara Convention Center was ARM Techcon 2011 – Chip Design Day.   While walking the Exhibit Hall, I met Lori Kate Smith, Sr. Manager Community Programs at ARM.   She introduced me to James Bruce, Lead Mobile Strategist at ARM who see the vision for the next 3 to 5 years in the Mobile space.   James gave a very interesting interview which can be heard here.

I also stopped by the Atrenta booth and spoke with Mike Gianfagna, V.P. of Marketing who talked about Early PPA analysis on AMBA-based designs.   We talked about how early what-if analysis of performance, power and area on different candidate SOC architecture implementations.   You can hear the interview with Mike here.

Besides the interviews, I also took photos of the exhibits and visitors to the event.  You can see the photo gallery below.

Enjoy!

+Graham