Archive for January, 2014
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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