Posts Tagged ‘Google’
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, October 26th, 2016
Last week on Friday and Saturday, the IEEE Council on EDA hosted a 2-day workshop to discuss the future of design automation. Mentor Graphics provided the venue – a large conference room in their Fremont/Silicon Valley campus – and workshop leaders, UCSD Prof. Andrew Kahng, UCSD Prof. Farinaz Koushanfa, and Intel alum/CEDA President Shishpal Rawat provided the welcome.
Over the two days, a group of 50+ attendees – representing a wide cross-section of academics and industry experts – launched into conversations that were lively, energized, at times contentious, and completely engrossing. Put simply, there was no better place on the face of the globe on October 21st and 22nd where tech junkies were more intellectually challenged and entertained than at the Design Automation Futures Workshop in Fremont.
What made the workshop so compelling? For this, their inaugural DAFW, CEDA chose to address neuromorphic computing – the ultimate hotness related to machine learning, with a lot of promise for future applications. It doesn’t get any more design futures, or futuristic, than this.
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Tags: Andrew Kahng, DAFW 2016, Design Automation Futures Workshop, Farinaz Koushanfa, Google, IEEE CEDA, Intel, Machine Learning, Magma, Mentor Graphics, O-In Design Automation, Patrick Groeneveld, Richard Ho, Shishpal Rawat, Synopsys, The Rolling Stones, UC San Diego
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Thursday, May 5th, 2016
Luckily I arrived late to EDPS in Monterey on Friday, April 22, because I did not hear the introduction of the first keynote speaker or hear his name. A good thing, as it turns out. The speaker was a technologist who doesn’t embrace technology when it’s used as a tool for intrusions into our lives. He’s concerned about how our private facts have become part of the public fabric, accessible to anyone who knows how to navigate the Cloud.
And so, in the spirit of Life imitating Art, I’m not going to list his name here. That detail is fully available on the EDPS website, but it will not be articulated here. What will be articulated here, however, is the audience reaction to the Keynoter’s comments. The audience became part of the presentation, with the keynote address quickly morphing into a round table discussion, a group therapy session for technology whiz-kids who worry about the increasingly public nature of our private lives in this digital, always-connected era.
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Tags: Amazon, EDPS, Facebook, Google, IoT, Samsung, Tesla, US OPM
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Thursday, April 21st, 2016
Just as Auguste Rodin revived the art of sculpture at the end of the 19th century in Europe, and Wynton Marsalis rescued the art of jazz by the end of the 20th century in America, here in the 21st century University of Illinois CS professor Rob Rutenbar is resurrecting the art of teaching VLSI design around the world.
He’s doing that via his Coursera-based online class entitled VLSI CAD: Logic to Layout, a course with an enrollment that defies comprehension. Per Rutenbar’s own whimsy: “There are about 25,000 people working in the EDA industry today. About 55,000 of them have signed up for my class.”
I had a chance to speak by phone with Dr. Rutenbar earlier this week. He was sitting in his office in Urbana-Champaign, but looking out an academic landscape that encompasses the entire world.
[hint: a MOOC is a Massively Open Online Course.]
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Tags: Amazon, Auguste Rodin, Barnes-and-Noble, Borders, Cadence, Coursera, EDA, Google, Jeff Bezos, Massively Open Online Course, Microsoft, MOOC, Rob Rutenbar, Stanford, University of Illinois, VLSI CAD: Logic to Layout, VLSI Design, Wynton Marsalis
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Thursday, March 24th, 2016
To speak with Herb Reiter about the rationale for multi-die packaging is a chance to follow a logical and energetic continuum from first principles to a final conclusion. Namely, that as the era of the ASIC subsides, the era of the multi-die package will arrive full force.
Reiter, President of eda 2 asic, will be reiterating this line of thinking, in conjunction with a panel of like-minded experts, at the upcoming EDPS conference in Monterey on April 21st. In anticipation of that session – “Multi-Die IC Design and Application” – we spoke by phone this week. The conversation was compelling.
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Tags: Asim Salim, autonomous driving, Cliff Hou, Dusan Petranovic, eda 2 asic, EDPS, Ford, Gary Smith, Google, Herb Reiter, ITRS, Ivor Barber, Multi-die packaging, Paul Silvestri, Riko Radojcic, TSMC
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Thursday, December 10th, 2015
If Wednesday night’s EDAC event at their headquarters in San Jose is any indication, things ain’t so good in the EDA ‘hood. There are no investors, no startups, no energy, no room for innovation, no luster, and ergo no young people.
Although, Jim Hogan – who shared the evening’s stage with Ansys/Apache VP & GM John Lee – said that if you think EDA’s bad, you should look at Google. According to Hogan, the luster’s gone at Google as well, buses transporting techies from Silicon Valley to their habitats elsewhere are running half empty, and nobody wants to be there anymore. The Google glam is gone, per Hogan, even though the overpaid youngsters he knows who work there are regularly pulling in salaries of $500k and holding an additional $500k in stock.
Hogan had no answer for how EDA was going to match those perks, but both he and Lee agreed that everything’s cyclical and therefore if everybody can just hold on for another 5 years, EDA will be back in fashion.
Meanwhile, it still ain’t so good in the EDA hood … or is it?
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Tags: Ansys, Apache, Avanti, Cadence, CMU, DAC, EDA, EDAC, Google, Jerry Hsu, Jim Hogan, John Lee, Mentor, Nassda, Roh Rohrer, Synopsys
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Wednesday, November 18th, 2015
It’s pretty hard to believe that Synopsys has been hacked. And not just any hack, but 4 months’ worth, per the company’s own announcement, of some unauthorized ‘somebody’ having access to everything that Synopsys sells. Seriously? How could Synopsys have left the barn door open?
Consider Google. Last year in response to North Korea’s gleeful mega-hack into Sony as punishment for producing the then-not-yet-released satire, “The Interview”, the entire entertainment industry fled into their caves trembling. Very few were willing to distribute the movie because of North Korea’s proven prowess as a cyber-bully.
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Tags: Barn Door, Cyber-bully, David Drummond, Google, Mandiant, Sony, Synopsys, Ted Miracco
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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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Monday, March 23rd, 2015
The last time I spoke at length with OneSpin’s Dave Kelf, the conversation was all about the Cloud. This week we picked up where we left off, talking about the Cloud, but then moved on to the Wild West. Dave is quite taken with the idea that the current situation in EDA is on par with the Wild West, that mythical place where a lack of structure and entrenched establishment allows true innovators to run wild free. First however, we caught up with OneSpin and the Cloud.
Dave said, “These days, engineers cannot afford to stick their necks out. Neither their managers nor their corporate leadership want to take risks, and the engineers know it. Although engineers realize moving design to the Cloud makes sense, when they try to explain that to their bosses or corporate lawyers it often leads to legal discussions around the problems of having [propriety] IP leave the company’s server.
“At OneSpin, however, we are able to eliminate these issues by generating abstract verification proof problems that go to the Cloud for computation without the transfer of IP or even [identifiable markers], assuring our customers that the process is very secure. Moving to the Cloud means design teams will have access to infinite computing, with huge verification jobs running simultaneously.”
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Tags: Amazon, Assertion-Based Formal Verification, Broadcom, Cadence, Dave Kelf, Fujitsu, GlobalFoundries, Google, high-level synthesis, Intel, Microsoft, NXP, OneSpin, OneSpin 360 DV-Inspect, OneSpin 360 DV-Verify, Qualcomm, Raik Brinkmann, Samsung, Silicon Cloud, Sony, Synopsys, SystemC, TSMC
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