Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Wednesday, January 15th, 2014
It’s clear that these are heady days in EDA and IP. The numbers have been up and to the right for a number of quarters now and everybody’s feeling good about things, including Mentor Graphics CEO Wally Rhines. He was doing the rounds last week talking up EDAC’s Market Statistics Service report on the industry for Q3_2013; the report was published this week on Tuesday.
On my phone call with Rhines I found him exuberant, so I started with a comment to which Rhines was not allowed to respond; he was speaking for EDAC in that conversation and not for his own organization. “Wow,” I said. “Mentor is really doing stupendously if your stock valuations are any indication, up over 40 percent in the last year.”
Rhines said nothing, but did chuckle, so I continued: “Wow again, then, for the overall EDA and IP industries. Having said that, I’ve noticed – perhaps not for the first time – that Synopsys does not officially submit numbers for these quarterly MSS updates. What’s up with that?”
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Tags: ARM, Cadence, EDA Consortium, EDAC, Mentor Graphics, MSS, Synopsys, Wally Rhines
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Thursday, January 9th, 2014
Since the ginormous Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week is widely touted as the biggest event since the invention of humankind, it’s hard to admit two things: a) I wasn’t there, and yet b) I’ve been asked to compose a blog about it. Somewhat of a challenge, but not an insurmountable one.
To attend to the task at hand, I slogged through the blogosphere to see what people who were there this week had to say about it all, after knocking in and around the largest conference on the planet.
Turns out their take-aways are pretty consistent: Among the 3000+ exhibitors, there were more toys on display than you could play with in a month of Sundays, drones are everywhere and somewhat creepy, TVs are getting bigger, electric cars are getting more so, everything’s wearable, and the only things left that are truly private and un-recordable in the mania of this digital age are your thoughts, and those are probably under assault in an evil lab somewhere. [Note to self: don’t sell them for a penny.]
Another way to approach CES, if you blog about EDA and IP, is to go to the roster of EDAC and see who on that list was exhibiting this week in Las Vegas. The results are rather surprising – only ARM and Cadence.
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Tags: ARM, Cadence, CES, EDAC, John Bruggeman, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys
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Wednesday, January 1st, 2014
As proposed last month in this space, I’m designing an SOC-based product that involves utilizing off-the-shelf IP. My whimsical design target is a wrist-based device that provides keyless entry and ignition for the car, control of the garage door opener, the ability to turn up/down the heat in the house remotely, and notification if we’re running low on milk. Oh yeah, and it will tell me the time.
To develop this product I need various reliable types of IP, including several processor cores, some memory, wireless connectivity design blocks, an oscillator and PLL for keeping time, a USB port for recharging, ADCs and DACs, and a bus of some kind to tie it all together. That’s just for starters, but it’s enough to prompt an online shopping trip comparable to the one described in my earlier blog about the hunt for ‘blocks of IP’ for the new bathroom installation currently underway at my house.
First and rather prosaically, I typed “what’s in an SOC” into Google. That query led me to Wikipedia, which led me to choose the list of IP described above. Naturally, your work is so much more sophisticated a process than this, but nonetheless the query allowed me to decide which pieces of semiconductor IP to go looking for. After all, the point of this exercise isn’t to design a ‘real’ chip, but to shop online for SIP and see what’s what.
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Tags: Arrow, ChipEstimate, Design&Reuse, Digi-key, Wikipedia
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Thursday, December 19th, 2013
This has been a complex year. Some stories were ferocious: the unspeakable double punch of earthquake and typhoon in the Philippines; the ongoing civil war in Syria; the Snowden/NSA revelations; the military coup in Egypt; the Boston Marathon bombings; the shopping mall attack in Nairobi; the shootings at the Washington Navy Yard; the discovery of kidnapping victims in Cleveland. Some stories were about historic change: a new pope; the death of Nelson Mandela; a choppy roll-out for the Affordable Healthcare Act.
Some stories were about trends: a decrease in unemployment; an increase in the financial markets; a marked uptick in housing values; the majority now carrying smart phones. Some stories were about SIP: Synopsys let loose a slew of IP-related press releases; Cadence acquired Tensilica and did the same; TSMC continued to portray itself as a foundry that just happens to have 3000+ IP cores in its arsenal; ARM remained the 800-pound gorilla.
Some stories were about EDA: Mentor talked non-stop about customers in the transportation sector and out-performed the Nasdaq, Dow, S&P500, CDNS and SNPS. FinFETs were all the rage, players big and small declared their readiness to embrace the technology, and Berkeley Prof. Chenming Hu accepted the Phil Kaufman Award. DAC celebrated 50 years and moved to Austin. EDAC had a party, celebrated EDA’s golden anniversary, and helped prepare a place of honor for design automation in the Computer History Museum. The industry sent a collective shout-out to Gary Smith.
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Tags: Ann Mutschler, ARM, Brian Bailey, Brian Fuller, Cadence, Chenming Hu, Computer History Museum, Ed Sperling, EDA, EDAC, FinFETs, Gabe Moretti, Gary Smith, Jeff Chappell, Katherine Derbyshire, Life of Pi, Mark LaPedus, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, TSMC
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Thursday, December 5th, 2013
When somebody runs for public office, they usually have several stump speeches that can be trouped out in front of the appropriate audience: “I’m very pro-labor” when the candidate’s standing in front of a manufacturing facility. “I believe government should be pro-business” when they’re standing in front of the Chamber of Commerce.
In recent years, I’ve heard Steve Wozniak speak numerous times and to me it seems he has at least 2 different stump speeches: “Technology is wonderful and is changing the world for the better” when talking at the Computer History Museum. “Steve Jobs made a lot of money off of things I invented” when talking in front of engineers at DAC, or a bunch of well-heeled suburbanites as he did this week at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center on Wednesday night.
The Steve Jobs bit probably plays well in front of engineers who often feel under-appreciated, or sense that Sales & Marketing makes more than their share of the winnings from intellectual property developed and refined by Design & Engineering. The Steve Jobs bit may not play so well, however, in front of mid-Peninsula suburbanites who drive late-model BMWs, Mercedes and the odd Tesla here and there, never chew with their mouths open, and passionately want their children to behave, excel on their SATs, and go to Ivy League schools. These people believe in Steve Jobs – they all carry iPhones and, more importantly, all believe in the money they’ve earned by investing in Apple here in the new millennium.
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Tags: Apple, Atari, Attribution, Computer History Museum, De Anza College, Homebrew Computer Club, IBM 360, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, U.C. Berkeley, Woz
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Thursday, November 21st, 2013
If you were designing a new bathroom, you’d have to become a minor subject expert across a fairly wide range of critical products: plumbing, fixtures, drains, toilets, sinks, tubs, mirrors, cabinets, fans, windows, doors, lighting, tile and paint. And that’s on top of mastering local building codes, which are often complex and difficult to interpret.
But that’s the exercise I’m been involved in lately, and now that the design is complete and construction about to begin, the list of vendors from whom bits and pieces of the project have been procured is quite astonishing: Delta, Moen, Hansgrohe, Grohe, Infinity, Toto, Geberit, Kohler, American Standard, Afina, Panasonic, Pella, Baldwin, Progress, Ashbury and Kelly Moore.
All of these suppliers have been chosen after lengthy evaluation of their individual offerings, price points, quality – often determined through reading endless online user reviews – availability and serviceability, not to mention feedback from the general contractor who’s got strong opinions of his own based on years of experience.
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Tags: IP evaluation
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Thursday, November 14th, 2013
Dassault Systemes hosted a 2-day customer confab in Las Vegas this week, with Qualcomm featured in the High Tech breakout session on November 13th.
Dwight Galbi, Principle/Manager in Qualcomm’s Physical Design unit, described his group’s success in using Dassault’s Pinpoint decision support system [acquired from Tuscany Design Automation in late 2012] to coordinate their recent DSP design efforts. Galbi’s endorsement was so enthusiastic, it’s clear that when it comes to design, Pinpoint is Qualcomm’s new sheriff in town.
Noting that it’s tough to put together a DSP when the team includes both power and signal integrity experts, logic designers and architects – and the design includes a bunch of “disjointed pieces” of IP all mixed together – Galbi said Qualcomm had been using its own internally developed solution to coordinate all of this, but the Pinpoint dashboard outperformed the in-house tool in at least three key areas.
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Tags: Dassault Systemes, Dwight Galbi, Pinpoint, Qualcomm, Tuscany Design Automation
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Thursday, October 31st, 2013
This week, the roving seminar/networking organization Angel Launch hosted yet another session aimed at connecting fund-rich VCs with idea-rich startups. The afternoon event on October 30th was hosted by Draper University in San Mateo, and included a panel of VCs speaking to a range of issues, followed by a 90-minute pitch fest where small startups could buy a couple of minutes to showcase their companies in front of the panel and get feedback, and maybe even funding.
After 3 hours of listening in, it was a simple trick to assemble a short list of Do’s and Don’ts for anybody who has it in mind to start, grow, and succeed in creating a small business. The whole process sure seemed straightforward. It’s a credit to the VCs on the panel that they made it sound that way.
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Tags: AngelLaunch, Startups
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Thursday, October 24th, 2013
Let’s just be bold and identify the elephant in the room: If IP providers and/or EDA tool vendors really wanted standards that were ubiquitous, complete, and effective, they would have implemented them years ago. But they don’t. Similarly, if IP users and/or EDA tool users really wanted standards that were universal, robust and truly useful, they would have demanded them years ago. But they don’t.
The truth is that IP providers are happiest when they’re insisting that their proprietary interface is the best, and ergo should be the de-facto industry standard. And it goes without saying that whatever they’re providing inside of their black box is, of course, best-in-class. Certainly no standards are ever going to be inserted in there, and for good reason! Full stop.
Meanwhile, IP users clearly consider the problem of integrating IP into their projects as an accepted, even advantageous cost of doing business here in the 21st century. The way they integrate third-party IP into their systems is tantamount to a secret sauce – one that’s cooked up in NDA arrangements between the user and the provider – and not something any IP user wants to make public by way of standards, or any other device, for fear their hard work learning/mastering the integration of IP, if revealed, might give a leg-up to the competition.
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Tags: EDA, Elephants, IP, Standards
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Thursday, October 17th, 2013
A brief sampler of recent announcements on the IP front reveal distinct themes in the marketplace. IP development and integration require a viable ecosystem of suppliers and tool vendors; automotive, audio and mobile apps continue to be important targets for IP developers whose customers seek better safety, longer battery life, and truer sound (particularly for sporting events and concerts of aging rockers); IP interfaces remain crucial; and platform-based design totally depends on further enhancements in IP technologies.
Additionally, acquisitions definitely pan out for the companies smart enough to snap up the good ones: Synopsys/ARC, Cadence/Tensilica, and Imagination/MIPS.
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Tags: Altera, ARC, ARM, ASSET InterTech, Cadence, CAST, Dolby, Freescale Semiconductor, Geir Skaaden, Geoff Lees, Imagination Technologies, IPextreme, Jack Guedj, John Couling, John Koeter, Martin Lund, Mentor Graphics, MIPS, Nikos Zervas, Pete Hutton, Suk Lee, Synopsys, Tensilica, Tom Halfhill, Tony King-Smith, TSMC, Warren Savage, Xilinx
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