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Peggy Aycinena
Peggy Aycinena
Peggy Aycinena is a contributing editor for EDACafe.Com

EDAC: What’s in a name?

 
March 9th, 2016 by Peggy Aycinena


EDAC has decided to change its name. At last.
What the new name will be, most do not know, but you can find out over some food and a glass of wine or beer on Wednesday evening, March 30th, at the Consortium’s headquarters on Zanker Road in San Jose.

Lots of people have been pointing out for a long time that membership in the EDA Consortium includes some of the biggest names in IP, not to mention embedded software, so not reflecting that reality in the organization’s name is pretty nonsensical. In fact, two recent blogs here on EDACafe specifically address the issue.

The first one is titled: “Answer’s nope: Should EDA Consortium become IP Consortium?” [September 30, 2015].

In this blog, I asked Mentor Graphics CEO Wally Rhines: “Aren’t the IP companies on the verge of overshadowing the size and impact of the EDA companies in the EDA Consortium. So much so, it seems like it’s time to change the name to the IP Consortium.”

Rhines responded, “It will never be the case that it’s all EDA or all IP. In fact, IP revenue is only one-third the size of the market tracked by MSS today. The other two-thirds is traditional EDA.

“Even ARM — although their market cap is $20 billion — their revenue is just about the same as Mentor’s. The EDA industry is a long way from being dominated by the IP industry, plus we’re in a very prosperous period in EDA. We’ve got 22 nanometers, 14, 10, 7 all working at the same time, so we’re meeting customer demands at all of these nodes.”

Last September, Dr. Rhines appeared distinctly underwhelmed by the argument that it’s time to change the Consortium’s name.

Read the rest of EDAC: What’s in a name?

Emulation Apps: Mentor Graphics enhances Veloce

 
February 25th, 2016 by Peggy Aycinena


Mentor Graphics announced new applications this week
for the company’s Veloce emulation platform. These new apps, per the company, are added to Mentor’s “arsenal of software innovations” for Veloce. The three new apps include:

* Veloce Deterministic ICE: Designed to overcome unpredictability in ICE environments by adding 100-percent visibility and repeatability for debug; provides access to other ‘virtual-based’ use models.

* Veloce DFT: Designed to accelerate DFT verification prior to tape-out to minimize the risk of catastrophic failure; significantly reduces run times when verifying designs after DFT insertion.

* Veloce FastPath: Designed to optimize emulation performance when verifying large multi-clock SoC designs by enabling faster model execution speed.

Read the rest of Emulation Apps: Mentor Graphics enhances Veloce

Emulation: DVCon invites Rizzatti to Expound

 
February 18th, 2016 by Peggy Aycinena


The folks at DVCon have done a brilliant thing.
They’ve invited Lauro Rizzatti to present at their upcoming conference on a topic that Rizzatti knows better than anybody, emulation. Last year alone, he wrote 40 articles on the subject.

More importantly, of course, Rizzatti helped guide EVE, the high-flying European EDA company that led the field in emulation from their base in France before being acquired by Synopsys in 2012. I spoke with Rizzatti this week about emulation, his talk at DVCon, and his recent endeavors writing about a technology that’s taking the world of verification by storm.

He started by establishing the importance of emulation today: “This technology is here to stay. It’s been around for 30 years, and [historically] was something only the big companies could afford to buy and use. They needed an army of engineers. Today it’s no longer a niche technology, however; it’s mainstream.”

Read the rest of Emulation: DVCon invites Rizzatti to Expound

ARM: The Musical, at last

 
January 27th, 2016 by Peggy Aycinena


The book that Sir Robin Saxby has been waiting for
has finally been written: “Mobile Unleashed: The Origin and Evolution of ARM Processors in Our Devices”.

Authored by SemiWiki’s Dan Nenni and Don Dingee, the book “delivers an informative look at events and technology that powered the mobile device industry to worldwide adoption.”

When I spoke with Dingee by phone this week, he said the book represents an enormous amount of work: “Sixteen months of intense research, 270 pages and over 800 footnotes.”

Other books have been written about ARM, he acknowledged, but this one is different: “People ask if this is a technology book or the story of ARM and I say, in truth it’s a little bit of both.”

Read the rest of ARM: The Musical, at last

Mentor CEO: a Shout-out to Marketing

 
January 7th, 2016 by Peggy Aycinena


If you ask Wally Rhines, CEO at Mentor Graphics
, about concerns that there has been too little disruptive change and, therefore, too little high-profile investment in the EDA industry over the last several years, he says: “It true that startups always like to see a spike up in growth.

“However, the biggest companies would like to see something closer to steady growth. Volatility is not as good for the bigger companies as it is for the smaller companies.”

If you ask: “But how viable is a high-tech industry when there’s no increase expected in VC funding for the foreseeable future?”

Rhines replies: “Yes, it’s true. VC funding in EDA has declined over the last 10 years, with the money often going instead into social networking. There is still ongoing investment today in EDA, however, but it’s angel funding, not VC funding.”

Read the rest of Mentor CEO: a Shout-out to Marketing

Auld Lang Syne: 2016 Awaits

 
December 17th, 2015 by Peggy Aycinena

The calendar year draws to a close, but not the momentum of technology as evidenced by the roadmap of conferences set to unfold over the next several months. There are so many opportunities to network, learn, and develop sales leads.

*****************

* CES2016: Consumer Electronics ShowJanuary 4-9 – Las Vegas

No one need tell you what CES encompasses: Simply everything. The 2016 edition includes keynotes from the CEOs of Intel, VW, CTA, Netflix, GM, IBM, and execs from Samsung, NBCUniversal, and YouTube. The future is always showcased at CES.

Read the rest of Auld Lang Syne: 2016 Awaits

SmartFlow Compliance Solutions: Taking the offensive on Software Piracy

 
November 18th, 2015 by Peggy Aycinena


This week Synopsys announced “unauthorized third-party access to Synopsys EDA, IP and optical products
and product license files through its customer-facing license and product delivery system. The unauthorized access, which began in July 2015, was discovered by Synopsys in October 2015.”

The fact that the company needs to make this announcement is indicative of a new attitude towards an old problem: Software companies who lose their products to theft and piracy no longer want to just buck up and get past it, particularly in EDA. Instead, they want tools and strategies to go after their adversaries. The newly launched startup SmartFlow Compliance Solutions, just announced last week, is planning to offer such tools.

Launched by Ted Miracco – one of the founders of EDA vendor AWR Corp. – SmartFlow is based on his experience dealing with pirated AWR product software, including tracking down and forcing restitution from companies who were proven culpable. In a phone call last week discussing his new company, Miracco said pirated software is more than just an occasional nuisance, it’s resulting in billions of dollars in lost revenue to the companies whose products are being used without licenses.

More profound than lost profits, however, is the ’tilting’ of the playing field. When companies who use pirated software to design chips or systems are able to undercut their competition by underpaying for the tools they need, or by not paying at all, the competition is hobbled.

In response, SmartFlow has engineered a complex set of tools and protocols that will allow companies to unearth pirated instantiations of their software across a variety of customer profiles. To begin their effort to build those tools, Miracco and his team looked closely at software non-compliance around the globe, parsed the different types of pirates and examined their principal strategies.

Read the rest of SmartFlow Compliance Solutions: Taking the offensive on Software Piracy

ARM TechCon: 800 Pounds of Gorilla in a Paradise of Mass Extinction

 
November 5th, 2015 by Peggy Aycinena


When it comes to conferences about IP, or design for that matter
, it sure seems like ARM TechCon has become the 800-pound gorilla. With over 100 exhibitors and folks coming in from all over the world to present or attend presentations, it’s huge.

Topics du jour at the Santa Clara Convention Center on November 10th to 12th are set to include security, IoT, connected cars, innovation, investments, embedded software, mobile devices, entertainment, low power, and more security. Not to mention things that can see for you, drive for you, sense for you, feel for you, and scare the hell out of you. In other words, everything that defines life here in 2015. Or so they tell us.

But let’s look at what won’t be on the menu at ARM TechCon. International dismay over downed aircraft. International dismay over automobiles that lie when they’re tested for emissions. International dismay over cyberhacking orchestrated by one nation-state against another. And the UK’s decision to prohibit encryption of online communication to the level that nation states cannot break the code. In other words, everything the defines life here in 2015.

The other thing that won’t be on the menu? My own recent consumer history.

Read the rest of ARM TechCon: 800 Pounds of Gorilla in a Paradise of Mass Extinction

EDAC’s Costume Contest: Patent Trolls don’t win

 
October 29th, 2015 by Peggy Aycinena


It’s the gospel truth
that if you want to know what went down this evening at the first event in EDAC’s newly launched legal series, you can just wait a sec and see the video when it’s posted to the consortium’s website. But then, as they say, why let the truth get in the way of a good story.

I sat in the back of the room at 3801 Zanker Road in San Jose, imbibing a bit of La Crema Chardonnay and enjoying way too much shrimp and cocktail sauce. Best place if you want to relax, enjoy the evening, and count heads. There were 75 in the room, by the way, all there to enjoy the 2-hour gab fest. And gab fest it was.

Read the rest of EDAC’s Costume Contest: Patent Trolls don’t win

Fingerprinting IP: IPextreme’s Motive, Means, Opportunity

 
October 15th, 2015 by Peggy Aycinena


There’s a term for engineering solutions that are simple, necessary and sufficient.
The term is elegant. And that’s the term that must be applied to the latest announcement out of IPextreme.

The company has come up with a simple, elegant process whereby IP blocks can be assigned a fingerprint, an unalterable bit of code that can be attached to the block and stays with it as that IP passes along into a chip design. The fingerprint then allows that IP to be detected, using IPextreme’s DNA analysis tool, by everyone involved with that chip going forward. Where everyone includes not just the engineers, but the lawyers and accountants in semiconductor companies who need to verify that a particular IP block in a commercial design has been legally procured and paid for.

Because, ultimately IPextreme’s fingerprinting scheme is about above-board licensing of IP, and guaranteeing legitimate revenue for the companies that make third-party IP and design reuse a reality. It’s that simple and elegant.

Read the rest of Fingerprinting IP: IPextreme’s Motive, Means, Opportunity




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