IP Showcase 
Peggy Aycinena
Peggy Aycinena is a contributing editor for EDACafe.Com Celebrating Accellera’s UVM: Now it’s IEEE 1800.2April 27th, 2017 by Peggy Aycinena
The effort has consumed upwards of 10 years, and represents thousands of man-hours of effort, consultation, compromise, consensus building, rinse and repeat. Over and over until the final product was polished, presented and approved by the IEEE. Not an easy process by anybody’s estimation. When we spoke by phone this week about the Accellera announcement, I asked Tom Alsop [Principal Engineer at Intel] how difficult the whole thing had actually been. He chuckled slightly: “For us, it was fairly difficult.” Read the rest of Celebrating Accellera’s UVM: Now it’s IEEE 1800.2 IP for Cars: Lawsuits are like SandstormsApril 20th, 2017 by Peggy Aycinena
Chips in cars today need to manage the power train, or they need to provide safety and security for the driver – but either way, they need to work perfectly every time, all the time, and in some pretty hellish conditions. It’s hot under the hood and the road today is unforgiving. So are the lawyers. So what’s a third-party IP provider supposed to do? Turn tail and run? Never sell into the automotive market where litigation looms larger than a sandstorm in April on the Texas Panhandle? Or try to man-up and work with the automotive market to provide IP that fits well into the chips that such customers need? ESDA CEO Confab: It was a Dark and Stormy NightApril 13th, 2017 by Peggy Aycinena
Meanwhile, exactly in the midst of the most violent part of this mysterious storm, the CEOs of the four most important companies within the ESD Alliance sat on stools in front of an audience assembled at Synopsys and chatted about this, that, and the other. Seemingly oblivious to the profound violence unleashing itself just outside the windows, they acted as if nothing was amiss. Everything in the industry – and the world – was in order: Wonderful, with the data pointing continuously up and to the right, and everywhere ample evidence for a bullish, optimistic, and excited outlook on the future of EDA and IP. No matter that Nature was having its way out there in the darkness, that the U.S. had bombed Syria the hour before their discussion began, that the drumbeat for answers about entanglements with Russia was quickening, or difficult conversations with the President of the PRC were underway that very day in Florida – the CEOs of Synopsys, Cadence, Siemens/Mentor Graphics and SoftBank/ARM sat relaxed and easy, basking in the evident vitality of the EDA and IP industries, and allowing themselves to be shepherded through a congenial confab of confident chit-chat by Ed Sperling of Semiconductor Engineering fame. That fact that the vagaries of Nature never came into the conversation was not surprising; the fact the Mr. Sperling refused all opportunities to bring what he termed as “politics” into the conversation was quite the opposite. Surprising, that is. Read the rest of ESDA CEO Confab: It was a Dark and Stormy Night Performance-IP: Finding a Different way to CompeteMarch 16th, 2017 by Peggy Aycinena
It’s true, this is not the first IP company co-founded by Performance-IP CTO Gregg Recupero. In the early 1990’s, he helped to found VAutomation which developed IP for system-level verification [and was acquired by ARC in 2000]. In our phone call this week, I asked Recupero how a small IP company today can compete with the behemoth IP providers. Read the rest of Performance-IP: Finding a Different way to Compete The Power of Yelp: Designing Chips versus BathroomsMarch 9th, 2017 by Peggy Aycinena
Because these days, bathrooms and chips incorporate a huge number of IP blocks and the process of tracking down the final candidates, reworking the design over and over to see how each candidate fits in, then making the final selection, confirming with each IP vendor that the price and availability of their particular block meets your design budget and schedule, then nailing down the finished design, actually ordering and paying for the IP that will go into the design, and crossing your fingers that nothing untowards has happened between the moment you made your final part/IP selection and the moment the vendor’s supposed to pony up the goods. The process of creating a bathroom or chip design that includes a great deal of IP is really complex. It requires a lot of shopping, validating, purchasing, receiving and integrating IP into the design. Read the rest of The Power of Yelp: Designing Chips versus Bathrooms Oski Technology: new VIP supports Formal Sign-offFebruary 23rd, 2017 by Peggy Aycinena
When we spoke on the phone about the announcement, I asked Oski VP of Applications Engineering Roger Sabbagh why now for this product release. He said: “I personally have been working in Formal since the year 2000, back when I joined 0-In, and over the years I’ve learned that formal adoption grows slowly. “Yet although there has never been a knee in the curve, we have seen some important developments in the industry. Synopsys developed PC Formal and Cadence bought Jasper, both indicating that Formal is catching on slowly but surely.” Read the rest of Oski Technology: new VIP supports Formal Sign-off Roadmap @ ISSCC: When will we Stop Driving our CarsFebruary 16th, 2017 by Peggy Aycinena
Over the course of the hour, the six speakers outlined their different visions of the technical roadmap that must be pursued to achieve fully autonomous cars. Of the six speakers, however, only three actually attempted to answer the panel prompt and their answers were wildly disparate. So when will we stop driving our cars? 1) It’s impossible to know. 2) Not until 2030. 3) We already are beginning to stop driving our cars. The panel was moderated by a senior Intel engineer, heavily involved in the company’s newly organized business unit specifically focused on autonomous driving systems. Read the rest of Roadmap @ ISSCC: When will we Stop Driving our Cars Apocalypse soon: RISC-V channels mammals after the AsteroidJanuary 19th, 2017 by Peggy Aycinena
Pretty dramatic stuff. Hence it should not have been surprising, at the end of the 75-minute discussion on stage between Jim Hogan and Microsemi’s Ted Speers and SiFive’s Yunsup Lee, that I raised my hand and asked why Simon Segars was not in the room. After all, Simon Segars is both CEO of ARM and a key member of the Board of the Alliance that organized the Hogan-Speers-Lee program – a program where the emerging RISC-V movement was described as poised to upend the primacy of ARM etc. Hogan responded to my question without answering: “Look, ARM is challenging by serving the low-cost processor market. License fees, royalty fees – that is what ARM wants for their low-power edge-based device. I think it was Simon, for example, who started talking to The Street about his economic strategy. It’s not really about what the best technology is, but about the economics. This is what gets the traction, and ARM will respond in an economic way.” “Yes,” Ted Speers added, “and Intel and Imagination will also respond.” Read the rest of Apocalypse soon: RISC-V channels mammals after the Asteroid RISC-V: ESD Alliance to showcase Situational Irony on Jan 18thJanuary 5th, 2017 by Peggy Aycinena
In a nod to the best in situational irony, the Alliance is hosting an evening event in Silicon Valley on January 18th specifically to discuss this open source processor architecture, which per some has the potential to turn ARM’s market dominance on its ear. Read the rest of RISC-V: ESD Alliance to showcase Situational Irony on Jan 18th |
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