Posts Tagged ‘Apple’
Sunday, December 31st, 2017
Here are some random predictions for 2018 and beyond. No rhyme or reason to the list, but just a zany way to usher in the New Year.
1) Autonomous vehicles will rule the roads, after the requisite number of high-profile crashes.
2) Electric vehicles will shut down the power grid, precipitating wholesale revolt from those who cleave to their combustion engines.
3) Problems with returning online purchases will move legions of shoppers back to brick and mortar retail.
4) The piles of stuff due to #3 will continue to grow, further increasing the National Crisis of Clutter.
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Tags: Alphabet, Apple, Facebook, LED, Penmanship, Silicon Valley
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Thursday, December 21st, 2017
Verific Design Automation in based in Alameda, not exactly Silicon Valley, but close enough to be within driving distance. The company has been in existence for almost 20 years and reports few competitors, if any. Instead, they see themselves as the de-facto standard for HDL language parsers, and as such can be found in just about every chip design flow.
In fact, according to Rick Carlson, Verific VP of Worldwide Sales, he’s more astonished with each passing day just how many places applications developed on top of Verific can be found. Not because he doubts the quality of the product, but because of the wide diversity of industries who are now developing chips.
Rick Carlson also knows a thing or two about building collegiality between the companies that constitute the EDA industry. He was one of the founders of the EDA Consortium 30 years ago, and the Phil Kaufman Award. We spoke at length last month.
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Tags: AI, Apple, Applicon, ARM, Atari, Averant, Cadence, Calma, Commodore, Computervision, Daisy Systems, Dave Millman, EDA Consortium, EDA Systems, EDAC, Escalade, ESD Alliance, Go, IEEE 1801, IIT Chicago, Intel, Invionics, Mentor, Microsoft, Northstar, NVIDIA, Phil Kaufman Award, Qualcomm, RISC-V, Samsung, Sinclair, Steve Jobs, Synopsys, Synplicity, UPF 3.0, Valid Logic, Verific
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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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Wednesday, June 14th, 2017
The following transcript is from a panel that’s not showcasing at the Design Automation Conference next week in Austin. It was submitted as an idea last Fall, but was declined by conference organizers.
Why was that? Is the idea of crowd sourcing chip design a tad too open source-ish for the EDA establishment, too community based and innovative? Who knows.
The panel discussion took place, nonetheless, several weeks ago and is available below. It’s a conversation between eFabless Co-founder & CTO Mohamed Kassem and TopCoder Co-founder Jack Hughes, now Director of Tongal and member of the eFabless Board.
Per the eFabless website, the company “applies collective and multidisciplinary community knowledge to all aspects of semiconductor product development.”
Per the TopCoder website, this company has a “community of over 1,000,000 design and technology experts [providing] on-demand capability, bandwidth, and velocity so you can do more.”
The dialog below reflects both Jack Hughes’ and Mohamed Kassem’s deep knowledge around the issues of building design communities, open-source technology, and crowd sourcing design.
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Tags: Amazon, Apple, ARM, Crowd sourcing, DAC 2017, eFabless, Facebook, Fitbit, GitHub, Google, GoPro, Jack Hughes, Linux, mixed-domain knowledge, Mohamed Kassem, NVIDIA, RISC-V, Tongal, TopCoder, Wally Rhines, X-Fab
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Wednesday, April 27th, 2016
Last year at DAC in San Francisco, Synopsys’ Patrick Groeneveld and TUM Create’s Sebastian Steinhorst gave an afternoon tutorial addressing the energy equations around the current spate of electric vehicles. One of the most information-packed sessions I’ve ever attended at DAC, it reflected an enormous amount of work on the part of the two presenters.
Now here in April 2016, rumor and information in the press about EVs is really on the upswing. Apple is developing an EV in various top-secret locations scattered about Silicon Valley, a rumor supported by the company hiring Tesla’s VP of Vehicle Engineering Chris Porritt. Tesla has its own dramatic announcement: As of mid-April, they’ve received upwards of 400,000 pre-production orders for their new $35,000 Model 3 sedan.
My recent phone call with Patrick Groeneveld was an opportunity to further understand the current EV landscape: We began with the Tesla news.
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Tags: Apple, BMW, Chevy, Electric Vehicles, Elon Musk, EV, Ford, GM, GM Korea, Mercedes, Model 3, NUMMI, Patrick Groeneveld, Sebastian Steinhorst, Steve Wozniak, Tesla, Toyota, VW
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Thursday, November 5th, 2015
Since initiating their Decoding Formal Club in October 2013, Oski Technology has hosted this much-needed get-together every quarter, most recently on October 21st of this year at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I was fortunate to attend the debut meeting in 2013, so it was interesting to hear from Oski VP Jin Zhang that the support group is proving valuable to the growing numbers who attend.
“The first time we held the meeting,” Zhang said, “it was by invitation only, and we included about a dozen folks. Since that first event, we have continued to use the same room at the Computer History Museum, a room that can hold up to 40 people.
“The workshop, however, is continuing to grow very nicely, so we are faced with either finding a new venue or working with the museum to arrange for a bigger room for our next meeting in the first quarter of 2016.”
Zhang said interest in the event has increased to the point that people sign up to attend as soon as the date and time are announced. “They want to be sure they’ve got a spot,” she said.
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Tags: Apple, ARM, Broadcom, Cadence, Decoding Formal Club, formal verification, Google, Intel, Jin Zhang, Mentor Graphics, NVIDIA, Oski Technology, Synopsys
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Sunday, June 7th, 2015
Omygosh, DAC’s here again! Has it already been a year? Apparently yes, and apparently once again the Design Automation Conference is going to be great. And how does one know? Because once again the DAC Executive Committee is great, lead in 2015 by the more-than-capable Anne Cirkel (Mentor’s own). Everything from academia to industry, from networking to hard-core learning (read, ‘Nerd Alert!)’, from food and libation to product announcements: DAC is always special.
So today is Sunday, which in the world of DAC is a lovely day full of workshops for those interested in the newest, and social opportunities for those interested in the noshing and nattering. Sunday is also lovely, because it’s a moment for astonishing realizations, and this year’s 52nd DAC Sunday is no different. Here are my 10 favs:
10 — Per Stanford’s Philip Wong speaking in Workshop 2, carbon nanotubes are smooth which helps with mobility-restricting surface roughness and band-gap issues. Also CNTs are no longer “a bowl of spaghetti” when manufactured. Now they’re 99% orderly and courteously aligned. (read, ‘Is asking about the other 1% a legitimate question?’)
9 — EDA’s own Karen Bartleson of SNPS fame, has not only just completed 2 years of distinguished service as President of IEEE’s worldwide Standards Organization, she’s now been nominated to serve as President of the Whole Enchilada; Bartleson’s running for President of the IEEE itself. In a word, Wow!
8 — Design Automation Summer School, for those who have not been keeping up (read, ‘me’), is no longer a week-long confab in July. These days Summer School is a one-day event on DAC Sunday. Still highly attended and full of pithy content for The Young & The Restless in EDA.
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Tags: Ajoy Bose, Alain Labat, Anne Cirkel, Ansys, Apple, Atrenta, Cadence, DA Summer School, DAC, Design Automation Conference, EDAC, edaForum, Elliot Garbus, Fiat Chrysler Automotive, Four Seasons, Harvest Management Partners, IEEE, Intel, Karen Bartleson, Klauss Busse, Mentor Automotive, Mentor Graphics, Patrick Groenveld, Philip Wong, Soha Hassoun, Synopsys, Wally Rhines, WWDC15
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Thursday, January 29th, 2015
Despite the international hype over the rich and famous of Silicon Valley, the truth is far less glamorous. In fact, I would estimate that for every gazillionaire that’s celebrated for having “won” in the tech sector in Northern California, there are a good half million people behind him or her that have not. That have not “won” big, but have simply showed up for work each and every day in the Valley, labored away intelligently year after year, and lived out lives of quiet contribution — not quiet desperation — implementing ideas, engineering better bits of this system or that, and helping to direct business decisions and market strategies deep within the organizations that reside here.
These are not the people who are in the headlines of the lay press, the business press, or the lead story in tech pubs. And even though it seems these lesser heroes are supposed to read the stories in the press and pubs about their more successful colleagues, they probably don’t. They don’t believe the hype. They don’t believe Steve Jobs invented the iPhone. They don’t believe the streets of Silicon Valley are paved in gold.
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Tags: Apple, EDA, Silicon Valley
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Thursday, October 23rd, 2014
Dr. Pranav Ashar embodies the best of what EDA is all about these days, serving as articulate spokesman for the company’s technology, while tracking the wider view as well, the trends and future of the industry. I spoke with Dr. Ashar in early October and was impressed with his willingness to participate in an unscripted interview.
Our conversation was precipitated by Real Intent’s recent announcement of the 2014 release of its Meridian CDC product for clock-domain crossing analysis, which per the press release, adds enhanced speed, analysis and debug support for SoC and FPGA design teams, introduces a new CDC interface approach, a new way of debugging CDC violations, and a unique way to handle flat and hierarchical designs comprehensively. Dr. Ashar started our conversation by talking about the announcement.
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Tags: Apple, Bell Labs, clock-domain crossing analysis, Dr. Pranav Ashar, Facebook, Google, Meridian CDC, Microsoft, NEC Labs, Real Intent, VLSI Design
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Thursday, March 14th, 2013
From the podium in San Jose’s DoubleTree Hotel, Jasper Design Automation President & CEO Kathryn Kranen introduced tonight’s EDAC CEO Forecast Event as being “practically perfection” and she was right. With 97 people in the room, the event ran for 97 minutes and the audience [undoubtedly] gave the panel discussion a 97% approval rating. Kudos to all involved, including EDAC for hosting, and OCP-IP, Mod Marketing, and the DoubleTree for sponsoring the event.
Kranen started off the evening by bragging on good news out of EDA: It’s up and to the right for revenue in the industry, with a 4.9 percent increase between 3Q11 and 3Q12. She cited increased stock valuations over the last year for ARM [37%], Cadence [30%], Mentor [26%], PDF Solutions [98%], and Synopsys [17%] as an indication of the viability of EDA as an investment vehicle: If you’d put $100 into each of these companies a year ago, she said, you would have netted a 41% increase in a portfolio today worth $706.90, beating out other investment indices such as the NASDAQ and S&P 100 over the same time period.
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Tags: 14nm FinFET, Aart de Geus, Ansys, Apple, ARM, Cadence, Computer History Museum, DAC, DATE, DoubleTree, EDA Reunion, EUV, Google, Gordon Moore, Jasper Design Automation, Jim Hogan, Joe Costello, Kathryn Kranen, Lip-bu Tan, Mentor Graphics, MOD Marketing, Nimbic, OCP-IP, Raul Camposano, Rich Valera, Samsung, Simon Segars, Synopsys, Wally Rhines
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