Category Archives: methodology

State of the union…of digital and analog

I spent part of last Tuesday at the Cadence mixed-signal workshop. I went mainly out of interest to see how things had progressed since I worked at Cadence. I had been put in charge of what we called the Superchip … Continue reading

Posted in methodology | Comments Off

Software signoff again

What do you think the dominant design paradigm for electronic systems is going to be going forward? As I’ve said before, I believe that it is going to be taking software, probably written in C  and C++ , and synthesizing parts … Continue reading

Posted in embedded software, methodology | Comments Off

Jay Singh’s view

I met last week with Jay Singh of Plato Networks. His official title is “Manager CAE” which makes it sound like he’s in charge of schematic capture. Isn’t CAE what we used to call what Daisy, Mentor, Valid did in … Continue reading

Posted in eda industry, methodology | Comments Off

Oasys blog

As if I don’t do enough blogging over here, I’m starting a new blog over here for Oasys. They are announcing both the company and their product, Oasys RealTime Designer, today and of course will be showing it at DAC. … Continue reading

Posted in eda industry, methodology | Comments Off

Oasys

I see a fair number of EDA startups. Most of them have some potentially innovative technology that solves a problem that is getting or going to get worse at future process nodes. But it is really hard to assess whether … Continue reading

Posted in eda industry, methodology | Comments Off

FPGA software

Why isn’t there a large thriving FPGA software market? After all, something like 95% of semiconductor designs are FPGA so there should be scope for somebody to be successful in that market. If the big EDA companies have the wrong … Continue reading

Posted in eda industry, marketing, methodology | Comments Off

Systems: it’s turtles all the way down

According to Steven Hawking, Bertrand Russell once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our … Continue reading

Posted in methodology, semiconductor | Comments Off

Move up to software

I gave a dinner keynote at the Electronic Design Process 2009 meeting in Monterey last week. However, I’d already made the mistake of giving the secret recipe for any keynote speech (and, by way of confirmation, I received an email … Continue reading

Posted in methodology | Comments Off

ESL and software signoff

The DAC newsletter had a recent article on the ESL market. Gary Smith pointed out that one of the reasons that Cadence is struggling is that the fastest growing part of the market has been ESL, the most advanced design … Continue reading

Posted in methodology | Comments Off

Process variation: you can’t ignore statistics any more

I like to say that “you can’t ignore the physics any more” to point out that we have to worry about lots of physical effects that we never needed to consider. But “you can’t ignore the statistics any more” would … Continue reading

Posted in methodology | Comments Off