Posts Tagged ‘Mentor Graphics’
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, October 6th, 2016
In July 2008 and with much fanfare, Cadence declared its intention to purchase Mentor Graphics. The Cadence executive team was so confident the purchase would go through, then-CFO Bill Porter declared during an analysts’ call at the time: This acquisition is going to happen, Mentor needs us. Accept it and move on.
Well, people did move on. By September 2008, Cadence CEO Mike Fister, CFO Porter and the entire executive team had indeed moved on. CDNS Board member Lip-Bu Tan was named acting CEO and here, 8 years later, he continues to serve in that role.
* Results: Mentor stock in May 2008 was at about $11.50/share, by June 2008 it had moved to $16, by October 2008 it was down to less than $8, and by March 2009 was barely above $4. Ouch.
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Tags: Bill Porter, Cadence, Carl Icahn, Elliott Associates, Lip-bu Tan, Mentor Graphics, Mike Fister, Wally Rhines
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Thursday, June 30th, 2016
Exuberance and Optimism: the only two words required to describe EDA-Careers’ Mark Gilbert – even after 20 years in the trenches sorting out the who what and where of just about everybody in the EDA industry. Yes, he self-identifies as the fun guy in the white suit, seen hither and yon wherever the EDA Nation chooses to confab, but in reality he’s the good guy in the white hat who’s going to tell it to you straight, about your career and your goals.
Also by his own description, Mark Gilbert is “the big fish in a little pond” who serves as the leading head hunter and career counselor extraordinaire of EDA.
I was lucky enough to speak with Gilbert by phone this week. As he and I were both on the East Coast, coordinating the hour of the call was easy. Our conversation started with the usual query: How did you get started in this business?
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Tags: Aart de Geus, Altera, ATopTech, Cadence, EDA, EDA-Careers, Mark Gilbert, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, Wally Rhines
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Thursday, June 23rd, 2016
Michiel Ligthart, President and COO of Verific Design Automation, and Rick Carlson, VP of Worldwide Sales, have a proposal for young companies in the EDA industry and adjacent technologies: Come to Verific if your organization is early stage, in need of encouragement and wise counsel, and could benefit from access to Verific software to help you progress towards a commercial product launch.
In a recent phone call, Ligthart and Carlson explained the specifics of the Verific program, and delineated what it’s not: “We are not funding startups,” Ligthart said, “but we have changed our business model over the lifetime of our company to encourage innovation.
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Tags: Austemper, Cadence, Innergy Systems, Joe Costello, Mentor Graphics, NextOp, Oasys, Paul van Besouw, Rick Carlson, Sanjiv Kaul, Synopsys, Tortuga Logic, Verific Design Automation
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Thursday, March 17th, 2016
Mentor Graphics’ Tom Fitzpatrick gave a lunchtime talk at DVCon several weeks ago summarizing recent efforts to build a standard [set of standards?] around portable stimulus for verification. The room was packed with over 200 people and his talk was sufficiently complete, nobody asked any questions.
After his presentation, however, I did hear some comments. Namely that these types of standards are quite complex and difficult to develop. Hence, setting an actual delivery date of January 2017 for Portable Stimulus Standard Version 1 [PSS V1] is quite aggressive and optimistic.
I was not fully informed about Accellera’s Portable Stimulus Working Group [PSWG] prior to Fitzpatrick’s talk, so could not judge whether January 2017 is or is not overly optimistic as a delivery date for the standard. Since DVCon, I have studied the slides and attempted to better understand what this is all about: What is a Portable stimulus and what would a set of standards look like?
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Tags: Accellera, Accellera PSWG, Agnisys, AMD, AMIQ EDA, Analog Devices, Breker Verification Systems, Cadence, Cisco, DVCon, Faris Khundakjie, IBM, Intel, Mentor Graphics, NVIDIA, NXP, Portable Stimulus Working Group, Qualcomm, Semifore, Synopsys, Tom Anderson, Tom Fitzpatrick, Vayavya Labs
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Wednesday, February 24th, 2016
Emulation is everything in verification today and therefore at the center of DVCon. Technology expert, Lauro Rizzatti, has prepared this brief tutorial for you, so you’ll be ready for the conference that starts on February 29th.
* The Past
Hardware emulation has been around for 3 decades. It started in the mid 80s with pioneers like Quickturn and Ikos, who used off-the-shelf FPGAs in the fabric of their emulators. The second decade saw the rise of several startups, some of them using custom silicon devices in the emulators.
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Tags: Cadence, DVCon, Emulation, EVE, Ikos, Lauro Rizzatti, Mentor Graphics, Quickturn, Synopsys
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Wednesday, January 20th, 2016
Just short of 2 years ago, the EDA press corps sat in a room in the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara and enjoyed a face-to-face with Cadence CEO Lip-Bu Tan. A full report of that conversation is available here, but it is the closing segment of the report that informs this blog:
Finally, the Cadence PR machine closed out the hour by making sure the Press Corps was privy to the human side of CEO Tan. It would appear his wife does not make the tech-product purchasing decisions at home as much as do the two boys. Tan said that his two CMU-educated engineer sons are smart and savvy, and had advised him early on to invest in both Netflix and Tesla. Tan humbly acknowledged that he had, unfortunately, ignored those two pieces of advice and hence had lost out on the opportunity to win big in both movies and EVs.
So, here’s the hypothetical: Given Lip-Bu Tan’s involvement with a $2 billion investment group – efforts interleaved with his responsibilities as Cadence CEO – wouldn’t it have been wise to harvest stock tips from his press meeting back in March 2014 in Santa Clara?
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Tags: Ansys, ARM, Cadence, GoPro, Lip-bu Tan, Mentor Graphics, Netflix, PDF Solutions, Synopsys, Tesla
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Thursday, January 7th, 2016
If you’re interested in the past, the third quarter of 2015 is a good place to start: the EDA/IP industries did very well from July through September last year. EDAC’s Market Statistics Service numbers, released this week, offer some of the details. Here’s the link if you want to delve in.
Easier however, is this brief summary of my January 5th phone call with Mentor’s perpetually optimistic CEO Wally Rhines, last year’s EDAC/CEDA Kaufman Award winner and this year’s EDAC spokesman [technically, every year’s].
Although there was snow and ice on the roads around Wilsonville, Oregon, when we talked, nothing could put a damper on Rhines’ sunny outlook for the industry he leads: “The third quarter last year was another great quarter for the EDA and IP industries. With 7.1 percent growth, it was really good and even stronger than usual.
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Tags: Ansys, ARM, Cadence, EDAC, Market Statistics Service, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, Wally Rhines
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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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Wednesday, October 28th, 2015
Cars are cool. They’re personal transportation pods carefully crafted to the scale of the human body that zip from here to there at the discretion of the person behind the wheel. But it’s not the transportation aspect that has sold cars from the beginning of time; it’s the wow factor. A combination of metrics that take a vehicle from the ordinary to the extraordinary: provenance, make, style, workmanship, power, vintage, color, price, exclusivity.
Today, new metrics are figuring with increasing urgency into the traditional wow-factor calculus that sells cars. Things like type of power train – only hybrid and electric need apply. Bells-and-whistles infotainment systems to tell you where you are now and how to get to where you’re going, while keeping you uniquely entertained en route and caught up with your phone calls. And a host of safety features: Is your airbag functional? What nearby vehicles are trying to cut you off? Are your tires appropriately inflated? How much fuel is left if you travel at a given speed? What’s really behind you when you’re backing up?
All of these new-fangled metrics are, of course, products of the digital age – and engineering teams that need a heck-of-a-lot more sophisticated design tools than in the olden days. This week Mentor Graphics – a certifiable behind-the-scenes kingpin in the automotive supply chain scene – announced one such tool, if an embedded OS can be called a tool.
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Tags: Andrew Patterson, GENIVI Alliance, GENIVI-based Linux platform, Mentor Automotive, Mentor Automotive Connected OS, Mentor Graphics
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