Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Thursday, September 7th, 2017
John Kibarian has been involved with PDF Solutions since co-founding the company in 1991 in Pittsburgh, through its relocation to California in 1996, through the IPO in 2001, and on into today. He’s been CEO since 2000. PDF Co-founder Kimon Michaels has also been with the company since the beginning, and currently serves as VP of Products and Solutions.
As well, CMU Professor Andrzej Strojwas [2016 Phil Kaufman Award recipient] has been PDF’s Chief Technical Advisor from the beginning — not surprising considering he served as Kibarian’s PhD thesis adviser at CMU — and Lucio Lanza has been on the board of directors for 20 years, serving as Chairman since 2004.
PDF is a company that defines stability, steady growth, and an intellectually rigorous and serious-minded approach to solving problems. It’s not a company of self-promoters or grand-standers. It’s a company of highly accomplished technologists, deeply involved in one of the toughest jobs in semiconductors: Finding out why chip yields are good, bad or ugly, and figuring out how that data might be used to improve design and manufacturing.
The last time I interviewed John Kibarian, it was 2015 and PDF Solutions had just acquired Syntricity a company with yield-improvement technology and services for the IC process life cycle.
This time when Kibarian and I spoke, PDF had just acquired several assets of Kinesys Software, including its ALPS (Assembly Line Production Supervisor) software, “designed to enable complete manufacturing traceability, including individual devices and substrates, through the entire assembly and packaging processes” – capabilities which PDF plans to integrate with their Exensio big data analytics platform.
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Tags: Andrzej Strojwas, Coventor, Design for Inspection, EDAC, ESD Alliance, John Kibarian, Kathryn Kranen, Kimon Michaels, Kinesys Software, LAM, Lucio Lanza, Moore's Law, PDF Solutions
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Thursday, August 31st, 2017
Amit Gupta is the quintessential entrepreneur in EDA. Even as he was graduating with degrees in EE and CS from University of Saskatchewan, he was co-founding Analog Design Automation, targeted at those who need tools to automate analog chip design. That was in 1999. The company was sold to Synopsys in 2004, and then Gupta co-founded Solido Design Automation in 2005.
This week, I had a chance to speak at length with Amit Gupta. The last time we conversed, it was at the January 2017 Kaufman Award dinner for Dr. Andres Strojwas in San Jose. That evening, Gupta was enthused about Solido’s access to high-quality engineering talent in Canada, and argued that the cost of living and quality of life in Saskatoon, where Solido is headquartered, more than compensate for any sense that Silicon Valley is the epicenter of the industry. His enthusiasm has only grown since that time.
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Tags: Amit Gupta, Analog Design Automation, Deloitte, Design Automation Conference, E3 Data Science, Eric Hall, ESD Alliance, finFET, GlobalFoundries, Gloria Nichols, Jeff Dyck, Mark Gilbert, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, Saskatoon, SOI, Solido Design Automation, Sorin Dobre, Synopsys, Ting Ku, TSMC, UX design
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Tuesday, August 22nd, 2017
In a recent conversation with OneSpin’s Dave Kelf, he laughed when I asked him to characterize the complexities of meeting functional safety standards when developing automotive electronics. “It’s a whole rat’s nest of certification,” he said, “and as an industry we’re not there yet.
“However, at OneSpin we have a good handle now on what you need to do to make these cars safe. We’ve been working for quite a while with Bosch, Infineon, and other companies that really have a good idea of what needs to happen with the chips in cars to make them safe.
“In fact, a large part of the regulations come from these guys because they’re the experts, along with some level of government oversight, in trying to make sense of it all.”
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Tags: Bosch, Dave Kelf, formal verification, Hamming code, Infineon, ISO 26262, OneSpin
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Thursday, August 17th, 2017
School started for many kids this week, which means family vacation time is over and you’ll need something else to fill your days. Attending conferences is always a good idea, and although the viability of conferences has been thoroughly questioned in the past, that concern has proven unwarranted.
No matter that the whole intent of your industry is to port more and more facets of our lives into the digital realm, learning and networking are still best done on human terms, starting and ending with a handshake. It turns out people like to talk to each other face-to-face, and hear from their colleagues in live settings whenever possible. Listed below are numerous chances to do just that.
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Tags: 2017 IEEE Photonics Conference, ARC Processor Summit 2017, ARM TechCon 2017, CDNLive, Decoding Formal Club Meeting, EDI Con 2017, EDPS 2017, ICCAD 2017, MATLAB Expo 2017, Mentor Forum 2017, TSMC OIP Ecosystem Forum
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Wednesday, August 9th, 2017
Recently, two items have been in the news. One was the Pride Parade in San Francisco, which featured floats from Google, Intel, Apple, and Amazon, accompanied by at least a thousand employees of each respective company marching west on Market Street to Civic Center Plaza.
The second item was the now widely-read manifesto from a former Google employee declaring that woman are biologically unfit to contribute to technology. The manifesto and its fallout triggered a billion words of reaction, not the least being finger-pointing at the companies who participated in the Pride Parade, along with suggestions that these companies have been corrupted by political correctness and need to be replaced.
So there you have it: Two diametrically opposed views of the world. What is the tech sector to do with itself?
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Tags: Amazon, Apple, Google, Intel
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Thursday, August 3rd, 2017
Of all of the EDA-related conferences that have taken place over the years, one of the very best has probably been one of the least well-known.
EDPS – the Electronic Design Process Symposium – has been held for the last 24 years in the spring in Monterey. The beloved destination of the late, great Gary Smith, EDPS has been host to some of the most informed conversations, esteemed speakers, and highest caliber content in EDA. Ever.
And now – proving that it actually is possible to improve Best in Class – the organizers of EDPS have made two radical changes, changes that will have far-reaching impact for the conference and its excellent content.
For the first time this year, EDPS is going to be in Milpitas, not 2 hours south in Monterey, and the conference is going to be happening in September, not April.
This is great news. Now people who live and work in Silicon Valley can more easily access the 2-day program and can more readily partake of the content. And those flying in from out-of-town can get to the conference venue more quickly without a long, strenuous drive to the coast.
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Tags: EDPS, Electronic Design Process Symposium, Gary Smith, Shishpal Rawat
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Wednesday, July 26th, 2017
In a great moment of situational irony, I was at my laptop intensely researching details of ISO 26262 in preparation for writing a blog about a recent conversation with OneSpin’s Dave Kelf when there was a shout from the kitchen: “The dishwasher’s smoking!”
I jumped up and ran to the kitchen. “It’s just steam,” I mocked, and opened the dishwasher door to prove my point. Lots of steam.
When I re-closed the door, however, the dishwasher did not start back up. The buttons atop the door wouldn’t take any input commands. Reaching under the sink, I unplugged the dishwasher and plugged it back in. Rebooted, the dishwasher now accepted the Start command, and I returned to my study to work further on ISO 26262.
“It’s still smoking!” someone yelled from the kitchen.
Again I jumped up and ran to the kitchen, jerked opened the dishwasher door and yep, it was indeed burning, internally.
Rancid smoke was coming up out of the vent holes at the top of the door, just adjacent to the cycle-select buttons. Reaching under the sink one more time, I quickly unplugged the dishwasher and then went to get a screwdriver.
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Tags: ADAS, Anthony Seely, ASIL, Functional Safety, GE Profile Dishwasher, IEC 61508, International Electrotechnical Commission, International Organization for Standardization, ISO 26262, Karl Greb, National Electric Code
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Wednesday, July 19th, 2017
Impersas CEO Simon Davidmann lead a tutorial at the Design Automation Conference last month in Austin. Prior to his presentation, we spoke by phone about the content of that tutorial.
“It’s a simple message we’re presenting at DAC,” Davidmann said, “but an important one. If you’re a semiconductor guy building a chip, your customers want to know what components are being used, but you also have to build the software that runs on top of it.
“There’s a lot of challenge, however, in getting an operating system up and running on the hardware and the problem extends to hardware-dependent software. Even the lowest level bits become part of the operating systems. So our tutorial is about what you need to do this work, about how to get hardware-dependent software running.”
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Tags: Agile, Altera, Cadence, CloudBees, Design Automation Conference, Imagination Technologies, Imperas, Jenkins, Linux, Simon Davidmann, Synopsys
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Thursday, July 13th, 2017
It was a great pleasure to sit down recently with Grant Martin – Distinguished Engineer in the Tensilica R&D/IP Group at Cadence – to discuss the 2nd edition of the 2-book compendium he is so closely associated with:
Volume 1: Electronic Design Automation for IC System Design, Verification, and Testing
Volume 2: Electronic Design Automation for IC Implementation, Circuit Design, and Process Technology
Grant Martin did not assemble and edit these mighty tomes as a sole practitioner. Also listed on the covers are Luciano Lavagno, Louis Scheffer, and Igor Markov – representing, respectively, the Politecnico di Torino, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and University of Michigan.
All four of these remarkably accomplished technologists had a hand in the newest edition, although according to Grant Martin, it was he, Lavagno, and Scheffer who oversaw the original effort in 2006.
When the publisher suggested an update to the set in 2011 – 5 years on – it ended up taking so much longer, it was actually 10 years before the 2nd edition was complete. Meanwhile, Prof. Markov had joined in on the work in 2014, so was appropriately added to the list of editors in 2016.
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Tags: Electronic Design Automation for IC Implementation Circuit Design and Process Technology, Electronic Design Automation for IC System Design Verification and Testing, Grant Martin, Igor Markov, Louis Scheffer, Luciano Lavagno
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Wednesday, July 12th, 2017
It’s happening. EDA is on its way out, and for good reason. The Millennials are lazy, can’t write or spell, don’t take direction well [if at all], don’t feel connected to The Corporation or relish reporting to The Man, and are annoyingly obsessed with work-life balance. A useless lot. What’s EDA going to do with them?
Nothing.
Instead, EDA’s going to turn to the vast armies of young worker bees coding away in geographies other than Northern California, Austin, Boston or Portland.
EDA is turning to the geographies where people are more concerned about career growth than work-life balance, and that’s usually on the other side of the International Date Line.
And really – it’s not like EDA doesn’t already know the way to those places. How many thousands of the 30k people ostensibly working in EDA today already work on the opposite side of the world from the hallowed ground where the Millennials are beginning to hold sway?
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Tags: AI, EDA, Millennials, Robots
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