Posts Tagged ‘Simon Davidmann’
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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Tuesday, December 8th, 2015
Simon Davidmann and the Imperas team are based near Oxford in the UK. Nonetheless, Davidmann is a regular at Silicon Valley events throughout the year. (Wouldn’t you like to know how many frequent flyer miles that represents?)
I spoke with Davidmann during one of his recent visits to Northern California. Per usual, the conversation was unscripted and informative; I asked for an update on Imperas, and Davidmann started at 35,000 feet.
“Let’s start with a bigger picture than just the company,” he suggested. “I said a long time ago that the challenge yesterday, today and tomorrow in technology is for people to move more towards the software and away from a strictly hardware-centric point of view. And that transition, of course, comes with the requirement that there be far fewer bugs in the software. Particularly if we expect mission critical apps to be dependable.
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Tags: Imperas Software, Open Virtual Platforms, Simon Davidmann
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Thursday, October 15th, 2015
Imperas Founder & CEO Simon Davidmann has been thinking about the EDA industry for a while, and the consortium that represents it. And like a lot of observers, he thinks change is in the air. In previous blogs, I myself have predicted that EDAC will evolve to offer better representation to IP providers, but Davidmann believes changes in the consortium will be even more dramatic.
“When EDAC was started,” Davidmann said in a recent phone call, “it was about CAD tools. But design automation has evolved from schematic layout and simulation to a point where everything is focused on really big designs. Yes, IP is a fundamental part of that evolution and companies like Synopsys have made a lot of investment in IP, so EDAC has no problem including IP in its landscape.
“But real problems today and tomorrow are about dealing with large systems on chips. Something that is moving the focus in the industry to software. Chip design is no longer just about design tools and IP, it’s about systems, and the software that runs on those platforms.
“As a consortium designed to help companies in the design automation business, therefore, EDAC has to look at not just design tools and IP. It also has to look at systems and software. An emerging technology, quickly moving into the mainstream, is virtual platforms for software development. Of course, Synopsys is investing in virtual platforms – an indication of the importance of such things in the design process.
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Tags: ARM, Cadence, Coverity, EDA Consortium, EDAC, Imagination Technologies, Imperas, inSilicon, Mentor Graphics, Simon Davidmann, Synopsys
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Thursday, February 20th, 2014
These are good days for virtual prototyping vendor, UK-based Imperas. The company will be making appearances this coming week at Embedded World in Nuremberg, at DVCon in San Jose the following week, and at CDNLive in Santa Clara the week after that, as well as several events in the UK in this same time frame. Imperas has a lot to talk about, including an announcement involving MIPS, a division of Imagination Technologies.
Per CEO Simon Davidmann in a recent phone call: “We’re small, self-funded and growing, with revenues last year up 65 percent. [Even better], the type of customers we’re seeing are tier-one semiconductor and embedded systems companies. We want to help people build better software. No one builds a chip without simulation, and we believe software development should be done like that as well.”
I asked about the competition. Simon answered, “It’s true, other people have models in the same space as ours – companies like Synopsys, Cadence and ARM – but we tend to cooperate with them. Our real competition is legacy breadboards, and kick-it-and-see techniques, rather than proper methodologies.
“For most complex SoCs, many people try to develop software with simulation at the RTL level, or with a hardware-accelerator box, but those approaches don’t get the throughput of software and performance they need. And with a prototype, they don’t get the controllability and observability. That’s why most of our competition is the legacy mindset in the customers.”
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Tags: ARM, Cadence, Imagination Technologies, Imperas, MIPS, Simon Davidmann, Synopsys, Tony King-Smith
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Sunday, April 15th, 2012
Open Virtual Platforms are an idea whose time has arrived. That is, if you understand what they are. Certainly, if you’re reading this blog, you know what a virtual platform is.
“Platform virtual machines are software packages that emulate the whole physical computer machine, often giving multiple virtual machines on one physical platform.”
For additional clarity, check it out on Wikipedia, paying particular attention to the incredibly dense/complex table found there that attempts to catalog various virtual platforms, their origins, supporting organizations, and features.
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Imperas & Open Virtual Platforms
So, if that’s what virtual platforms are, then what are Open Virtual Platforms, OVPs?
Imperas – an enterprise founded in Silicon Valley in 2008 – would like you to understand and use OVPs. To do that, they are sponsoring a portal-based community called Open Virtual Platforms – a resource designed to help chip developers have access to various open source virtual platforms, or models, of various commonly used hardware platforms endemic to the embedded systems world.
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Tags: AMD, ARM, emulator, Freescale, Imperas, Intel, KVM, Larry Lapides, MIPS, Open Virtual Platform, Oracle, OVP, PalmPilot, Renases, Simon Davidmann, Synopsys, virtual machine, virtual platform, virtualization, VMware, Xilinx
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