Friday puzzle: Nullarbor Plain

Posted on July 17, 2009 by paulmcl

Last week’s puzzle was to list all the countries that begin and end with “A”. It is surprisingly difficult. Austria, Australia…hmm. Ah yes, Albania. I gave you Antigua & Barbuda (in the Caribbean). A stage of the Tour de France finished in Andorra, in the Pyrenees between France and Spain, the day the puzzle appeared. The other 4 are Armenia, Algeria, Angola and surprisingly hard to think of given its size, Argentina.

Today’s puzzle sticks with one of these countries, Australia. Your plane has just crashed in the middle of the Nullarbor Plain in Australia, which is the location of the longest section of straight railroad in the world (299 miles). It is a moonless night and you can’t see anything around you, but you hear a train whistle and get a perfect bearing on which direction it came from. You know there is only one train per week and you’ll die if you don’t find it. What do you do?

Answer next week

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GM and Cadence

Posted on July 17, 2009 by paulmcl

What is the similarity between the problems and GM and those at Cadence? Well, there are certainly plenty of differences, GM has all sorts of problems which stem from over-generous union contracts for one. But the thing that brought problems to a head at both Cadence and GM have a similar basis.

In the early 2000s GM and Chrysler (and Ford and Toyota and everyone else) sold a total of 16 million cars, small trucks and SUVs each year. With low interest rates, basically everyone who wanted and could just about afford one, bought a new car. Do the math: 16 million times 6 years is 96 million vehicles which is getting on for the number of households in the US (111 million), or 40% of all adults (228 million). Going forward, not many people are going to be buying new cars since everyone already has one. Sales are expected to be maybe 10 million this year and that may turn out to be optimistic. Cars last a long time these days so, unless you crash your car and have it written off, it is a discretionary purchase that can be delayed for years. This problem is not unique to GM, Toyota’s sales numbers have fallen about the same. In essence, the auto industry sold in 6 years all the cars everyone would want for ten years while credit was easy and consumer confidence was high. GM is just the most vulnerable due to bad management and bad union contracts, but less vulnerable since you and I will be picking up the tab for all this. I fully expect GM to behave just like British Leyland in Britain, also publicly owned, did. They’ll lose a bucket of money but the government will just shovel more money into their gaping  maw rather than see them shut down. (Here’s another statistic: GM has to be worth more than it was in the early 2000s at its peak for the taxpayers to get any of their money back).

Cadence in the Fister/Bush era repeated the same mistake from the Olsen era of selling in a period of time almost all the licenses anyone was going to need for a much longer period of time. Once you’ve sold in 3 years all the software anyone needs in 5 years, it gets hard to make your number in the out 2 years.

Of course, both these are problems that time will fix. Eventually people will want new cars again and probably GM will still be there to sell them (since we’re covering all their losses). At least with Cadence it’s not us that are going to pay. And with Cadence it is a much shorter time period. Probably by the end of next year they’ll have eaten a good part of their way through the “supply tools, but accept that we’ve already been paid” and their number should start to improve.

GM may take longer. And, of course, both companies have other competitors (Synopsy, Toyota etc) ready to try to capitalize on any upturn.

But to put things in perspective, Cadence’s market cap at $1.4B is almost exactly twice General Motors ($700M).

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What should EDA do next?

Posted on July 16, 2009 by paulmcl

Which are the interesting areas of EDA right now? As a general rule, I think that the answer is "the ends" which today means the architectural level and the transistor layout level. There will always be some interesting areas in between too, of course, but the main flow from RTL to layout along with the respective verification methodologies are largely solved and so there is limited scope for major innovation.

The transistor layout level is really about the interface between EDA and semiconductor process. There are two things that make it a challenge. One is the changes in lithography which have complex effects on what can and cannot be put on a mask in a form that will print. The second is that EDA largely operates with a pass/fail model, whereas process is actually statistical. It is like the way we regard signals as digital, which works most of the time except occasionally the analog nature of signals breaks through when a signal changes too slowly or some other unusual effect causes the illusion to break down.

The architectural level is where chips and software intersect. Chip design people tend to think of the architectural level as somewhere that the system designers make a start on chip design. But a better way is to think of the software as a specification of the system and the only purpose of the chip is to run the software. Why would you not just run code on one of the on-chip microprocessors? Only for 3 reasons: to do so would be too slow, to do so would consume too much power, or you can’t do it in software without a special peripheral (for example, analog). Increasingly SoCs are processors, buses and memory, along with specialized IP blocks (which may themselves contain processors) for performance, power or analog reasons.

The big challenge in a system like that is getting the software right. I keep waiting for the virtual platform concept to really take off, since I’m convinced it is a better way to do development. Look at all the complaints about inaccuracy in the iPhone simulator (since it just cross-compiles) or the difficulty of doing performance analysis since you need to do it on the real phone. SoCs are much more complicated since typically they have multiple processors with different architectures since code running on (say) a Tensilica or ARC processor optimized for audio processing has very different characteristics from running the same code on an embedded PowerPC.

But the block diagram of the virtual platform is actually the chip specification as well.

I think that moving up to the architectural level should focus on this virtual platform level. Like Goldilock’s porridge, it is just right. It contains just the right amount of detail. By using the platform to run code, the software development can be done much more productively. By using the virtual platform as a specification on how to integrate all the processors and IP, the chip can be created. It is like using RTL but at a much higher level. With RTL we can simulate it to get the chip functionality right, and we can use it as an input to a (fairly) automatic process to create the silicon. The virtual platform has the potential to play this role.

That would mean that the architectural virtual platform level would become a handoff between the engineers creating the systems and the lower level implementation. With synthesis timing was the unifying thread across the handoff; with this sort of architectural handoff it is communication within the software, which interacts with timing, functionality and power, of course, making it possible to optimize the SoC implementation.

People looking at ESL only as behavioral synthesis I think are missing the point. It is like software engineers arguing about details of language syntax. The hard problems are all about writing large scale software or integrating dozens (or even hundreds) of IP blocks quickly and getting the software working. Yes, behavioral synthesis has its place as the ultimate in “inlining” functions with extremely high performance and low power, just as in the software world people occasionally hand craft assembly code and sometimes measure cache hit-rates.

As Yoshihito Kondo, general manager of Sony’s design platform division said, "We don’t want our engineers writing Verilog, we want them inventing concepts and transferring them into silicon and software using automated processes."

That one sentence is a vision for what EDA should aim to become.

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Guest blog: Scott Sandler

Posted on July 15, 2009 by paulmcl

Scott Sandler is the President of Springsoft USA. He began his career as a verification engineer at Intel, where he quickly learned that he liked the tools a lot better than the designs. He entered the EDA world in 1986 as the first AE for Verilog at Gateway Design Automation, and had stints at Cadence and Chrysalis before arriving at Novas in 1999 and leading it to its merger with Springsoft last year.

Value Proposition

When purchasing decisions for complex, high-tech products are made based mainly on price, users get the short end of the stick. They often end up having to get the job done with tools that are less capable than others on the market. This means they have to work harder to hit schedules, or that schedules slip and their company doesn’t make as much money as it could. Decisions based on value instead of price often yield better results for those organizations prepared to make them.

Buying based on value doesn’t always mean paying a high price, but it does mean  looking beyond the idea that tools are an expense, and finding ways to reduce the overall effort of designing and verifying chips. While price-based decisions are relatively easy, decisions based on value are more complex. Determining the value of a product requires looking beyond its price, and really understanding the return on investment (ROI) the organization can get by acquiring the product. Will the tool save time? Will it free up engineers to work on things that are more valuable? What will be the impact on the overall output of the organization?

These analyses take time and energy, and some organizations find it easier to buy based on price, which is unfortunate for everyone involved. Engineers often end up using inferior tools that make their jobs harder and their work less rewarding. Organizations put out products that are late or less capable than they could have been. Suppliers end up with lower profits, and thus innovation in automation slows down. This is a losing situation all the way around.

The value of automation (the most important word in EDA!) comes from redirecting engineering effort toward adding value to the chip, rather than just getting through the process. For an organization that designs complex system-on-chip devices to give up on driving its own methodology, instead relying on a supplier of bundled tools because they ostensibly “work together in a flow” or cost less, is potentially a grave mistake. By looking for ways to save time and add more value to their products, in other words investing in unique automation technologies that interoperate based on open standards, these organizations can better satisfy their employees, customers, and investors.

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France

Posted on July 14, 2009 by paulmcl

Today is July 14th, the equivalent in France of July 4th in the US. It commemorates the storming of the Bastille in 1789, which is considered to mark the start of the French Revolution.

I lived in France for over 5 years in the late 1980s. Like all countries, France is a mixture of things some of which are admirable and some of which are frustrating.

It is a great place to live with a deep culture. Food and wine, in particular, are an integral part of the culture in way they are not in the US. My kids got a 3-course lunch every day in school, since it was regarded as part of a school’s job to educate children about food. Eating in France is truly a social experience as well as just refuelling. When I first moved to France I was recommended to read the books by "Major Thompson" an Englishman living in France and bemused by the local habits (actually Pierre Daninos using this as a way to poke fun at his countrymen). He would pick on little things that the French made big often without even noticing. For example, lunch is at noon exactly in France. And it really is. When Disney opened in Paris they hadn’t planned for the fact that every single French family would want to eat at precisely 12, not spread out their meal from 11 to 3, which resulted in longer lines to eat than to get into Space Mountain. Dinner is late (but not Spanish late) and some restaurants don’t even open until 8pm.

The French culture has at its base an assumption that French culture is clearly superior to every other culture. It tends to be rather backward facing though, and sometimes willfully ignorant. If you think of French food, you think of that wonderful cuisine in the little restaurant in the little village. All true…but did you know that the largest private sector employer in France is McDonalds. The reality and the perception are not quite in step. I lived 20 miles from the Italian border but it was almost impossible to buy Italian wine. After all, French wine is obviously better. In Summer, the south of France is inundated with everyone in Paris since the French largely vacation only in France since that is where the best food, the best wine, the best beaches and the best vacation are to be found.

France has a two-speed society. If you have a job, even more so if you have a job in the public sector, then life is good. You are well paid, you can’t be fired, you have a generous pension, you have maybe 8 or even 10 weeks of vacation. If you don’t have a job then you are probably not getting one any time soon, and this was true even before the current downturn. Companies will do everything they can to avoid hiring people since once hired they cannot be fired. You might have read that per-capita productivity in France is higher than the US. This is true, but it is not really something to be that proud of. It reflects the fact that using a lot of capital makes more sense than using people; with a high minimum wage marginal jobs (supermarket bagging, say) don’t get done at all. And, especially, only employed people are included in the equation and the 10% or so unemployed are not counted as inefficiently producing nothing. In the US right now we are really worried at the unemployment rate. It has been at about that level in France for 30 years. Further, that doesn’t count the 2M people, mostly young, who had to leave the country to find a job. London is "France’s" 6th biggest city, in that more French people live in London than all but 5 French cities.

France has a streak of racism beneath the surface. A Swedish friend of mine, who had messed up his form applying for a work permit, was helped through it by the official. “Of course, if you were Arab, we’d have just rejected it,” the official said casually, as if it was obvious that anyone would share that opinion. Many of the “Arabs” are in fact French. The rules for French citizenship are not quite as immediate as in the US (if you are born in the US you are American, period) but take a second generation (if you are born in France, you are French if either your parents are French or your mother was born in France). Nonetheless, many of the people who originally immigrated from Algeria and Morocco have been there for generations.

The combination of a welfare state, the difficulty of getting employment for anyone, and the racism meaning that getting employment if you are of north African descent is even harder, is a toxic combination. The word “banlieue” in French means suburb, but it has come to mean the areas of public housing where the “immigrants” end up. Unemployment among the young can be as high as 50% and there is a level of violence in these areas that makes some of them no-go areas even for the police, and worrying for anyone. I once had to pick up a prescription in Cannes in the middle of the night when one of my kids was sick. I called the police to find out where the duty pharmacist was (no 24 hour Walgreens in France; you need permission from the existing pharmacies to open a new one, so obviously it is never forthcoming). They refused to tell me, but would only meet me at a street corner so they could escort me to the pharmacy since it was in one of these danger areas.

So the France you think of and see as a tourist is real. The history, the food, the wine, the language, the countryside, the markets, the cheese. But behind the curtains is some disturbing stuff and some foolish public policy that needs to get addressed for France to once again be truly great.

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Oasys blog

Posted on July 13, 2009 by paulmcl

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. RealTime Designer is the first product in a new category, chip synthesis. It is 40-100 times faster than conventional synthesis with enormous capacity. This doesn’t just change things a little. In the same way as an airplane is not just a faster bicycle, it changes the way we think about distance, RealTime Designer is not just a faster synthesis tool, it changes the way we think about design methodology.

Why am I doing another blog over there? Why don’t I just do it over here? Firstly, I’m being paid by Oasys to blog about stuff around their product, how their customers adopt it, how people design at the chip level and how the new space develops. That’s not specifically the focus of EDAgraffiti and I’d rather keep the two blogs separate. Over here I write about what ever I feel like writing about and give my unvarnished opinion or advice. I don’t have to worry about biting the hand that feeds me since over here I’m not being paid.

Having said that I do genuinely think that it is interesting to watch adoption of disruptive technology. Obviously I wasn’t blogging then (even the word didn’t exist), but watching the adoption of both place and route in the 1980s, and synthesis in the 1990s were both fascinating. The soul-searching that went with merging these technologies in this decade has also been interesting. It is not that long ago that the notion that the netlist that went into a place and route tool might actually get changed was unthinkable. The implications of power are another area in transition that is interesting to follow.

So go over there and take a look.

Normal service will be resumed over here tomorrow.

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Friday puzzle: countries

Posted on July 10, 2009 by paulmcl

Last week was the monkey puzzle. Monkeys go along a corridor shutting doors that are open and opening ones that are shut. It doesn’t take too much thought about this to realize that the doors left open will be those with an odd number of factors (and not just prime factors, all factors including 1). Almost all numbers have an even number of factors. If A divides N then N/A is also a factor, so they come in pairs. The one exception is perfect squares where both N and N/A are the same number so only get counted once. The third monkey doesn’t both open and shut door number 9 to take account of the fact that 3 is a factor of 9 twice over. So the answer is that the doors left open are the perfect squares, 1,4,9,16,25…961.

Today a country puzzle:

Name 9 countries that begin and end in A (in English). I’ll give you one just because it’s dubious: Antigua and Barbuda. You know the other 8 though. If you want a hint for another of the hard ones, watch the "Tour de France" today.

Here’s another country puzzle: pick a number from 1 to 10. Multiply by 9. Subtract 5. Add the digits. Add the digits again until you have a one-digit number. Whatever number that is, pick that letter of the alphabet (A=1, B=2 etc).

Now think of a country that begins with that letter.

Now think of an animal that begins with the last letter of that country.

What country is that animal from?

Australia. Oh, look, it begins and ends with A! Only 7 to go.

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Blogging

Posted on July 10, 2009 by paulmcl

I’ve been writing this blog since the start of the year. EDN’s content management system tells me that I’ve made over 150 posts. Some of them were guest bloggers and a few were just short items, but most of them were my usual length of 7-800 words. That means I’ve written something north of 100,000 words on EDA, Silicon Valley, software, semiconductor and the like. That’s a lot. A book. So what have I learned from all this?

Firstly, something that I already knew but which I feel much more strongly now. There are two separate parts to writing, working out what you are going to say and putting those thoughts into words. I can write really fast if I’ve already sorted out what point I’m trying to make. And in a blog entry of a few hundred words you can really only make one or two points. If I haven’t sorted out what I want to say, then starting to write is a really bad way of addressing that. Driving for 30 minutes with the radio off, or taking a shower, or having a coffee are all much better and a lot less frustrating.

One thing people often ask me is how long I spend writing a piece. The answer is about 45 minutes or an hour (assuming I already know what I’m going to say, but you knew that). A few times people have suggested an idea to me and I’ve got a blog item emailed out to get feedback from them within an hour. On a plane, I can write 3 or 4 entries on a battery for my MacBook.

How do I decide what to write on? I try and mix up subjects since a whole week of, say, finance would be boring. But some of the “boring” stuff like sales and finance is really important. EDA startups in particular usually get the technology right. It is the non-technical stuff that lets them down. I suppose I write the stuff I wish I’d known when I started in EDA.

The biggest frustration with blogging like this is that I don’t get much feedback. All sorts of people tell me that they read EDAgraffiti when they meet me. Very few people think to email me or to leave a comment on the blog. Reed has the policy of not letting page-view data outside of the company, and since I’m not an employee I don’t get to see (maybe it’s the same for the internal people outside management, I don’t know). So I don’t know how many people read EDAgraffiti, and I don’t know what type of people read EDAgraffiti. I don’t know which entries get read the most and which get nearly ignored.

I also get asked why I do this blog. You might assume I’m paid to do this but you’d be wrong. I do it partially because I enjoy it, partially because it is fun to give back to the industry some of what I’ve learned over the years, partially because it doesn’t do any harm to be more widely known in the industry and also because it helps as an advertisement of my knowledge to encourage people to engage me for consulting contracts (I’m available!). Although I’m not sure my blogging persona which someone described to me as “grouchy old man” is especially appealing from that point of view. EDA is more challenging right now than in the past and it doesn’t help to pretend that this is not so.

Anyway I have a favor to ask you, especially if you are regular reader. In fact two. First, go and vote for EDAgraffiti on Denali’s “next top blogger” competition. It will only take a couple of seconds. Secondly, send me an email with a couple of lines saying what your background is (design engineer, EDA marketing, semiconductor executive, whatever) and what topics that I’ve been covering you find the most interesting.

My email is paul®greenfolder.com (but change the ® to @).

Also, since it is months ago I last mentioned this, I often pre-announce blog entries and other stuff on Twitter, so you can follow paulmclellan there or else search on “edagraffiti”.

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Guest blog: David Hamilton

Posted on July 9, 2009 by paulmcl

One area that I don’t know as much about as I feel I should is test. And an area that I know even less about is analog test. David Hamilton is the CEO of ATEEDA, based in an area that I do know lots about (since I did my PhD there) Edinburgh Scotland. His company is working to extend the amount of analog testing that can be done without requiring an analog tester. Of course he’ll be at DAC if you want to find out more. David has has various roles in both academia and industry in both startups like SeFAB to multi-nationals like Honeywell.

ANALOG TEST FINALLY SUCCUMBS TO INEXORABLE DIGITAL TREND

For decades, our industry has shifted as much analog function into the digital domain as possible. Driven by astonishing scaling reductions, functionality has increased and costs reduced to the point where current consumer gadgets would have been indistinguishable from magic just a few years ago.

This digitizing trend has now extended beyond the design and into the manufacturing process. This promises a currently underexploited opportunity to take manufacturing cost out of semiconductors. But first some background: testing makes up about a fifth of the total cost of manufacturing. Moore’s law inexorably drove dimensions down through the technology nodes for digital, so while wafer-fab costs went up at each node, the cost per transistor went down even faster, giving cheaper die or improving functionality.

Several years ago, it became clear, that test costs were spiraling with transistor count for the digital sections of devices. EDA vendors developed tools to dramatically cut test time and hence cost for digital. Typically these eliminate redundancy in checking digital states and can be Built-In Self-Test (BIST) or loaded onto digital automatic test equipment (ATE).

However, the story is altogether different for Analog and Mixed Signal (AMS). Although analog has not seen the same rise in complexity, test costs have remained stubbornly high, up to 15c/sec for the most advanced analog capability. Test time spent is profit lost. Some high volume AMS chips take seconds and cost $millions to test. It is frustrating when a relatively small analog corner of the chip soaks up vast effort and cost just to develop and run suitable tests on production analog ATE.

Typically digital resources are far more parallel (x32 or x64 and beyond) than their analog counterparts minimizing production bottlenecks and cutting cost per tester site, so clearly testing analog circuitry using only digital resources has cost and throughput attractions. However, by definition, digital resources have limited analog capability such as switching between fixed voltages on digital outputs and checking against a fixed comparator threshold level on the input. One option to exploit this capability is to use BIST. While it is common in digital test and well supported by tools and standards, it is less widely adopted for analog.

BIST has several advantages for analog; greatly simplified ATE by eliminating expensive analog options, offline data processing bottlenecks avoided, parallel testing and the chance for wider circuit coverage of internal circuitry. However, before getting carried away with the benefits, there are significant barriers to universal adoption of BIST in analog. Firstly, the cost gains can be wiped out by the cost of the BIST silicon area. Secondly, while the designer always had to liaise with production test, BIST needs design effort upfront so it must be fast and easy to deploy. A welcome side effect of the latter can be shortened overall time to market. Thirdly, complex analog IP on-chip for BIST circuitry would need its own BIST!

So the characteristics needed for analog BIST to tackle escalating costs of analog test are clear. It must be small, primarily digital with very limited analog circuitry, supported by quick and easy to use EDA tools. A few companies have tried to introduce various exotic methodologies but these failed to gain traction, typically being too theoretical and abstract and inevitably failing the vital production test hurdle. Standards such as 1149.x even attempt to include analog in the boundary scan approach but this has not been universally adopted. A quick Google of ‘Analog EDA BIST’ shows the lack of tools available to meet the demanding requirements. Our company, ATEEDA does offer tools to give Push-Button BIST solutions for analog. These are primarily digital with tiny amounts of analog IP. For example, LinBIST automatically creates the HDL code to put predominantly digital tests on-chip in the smallest number of gates. It also directly targets convertors up to 12 bits with minimal on-chip analog IP giving the comfort of a methodology familiar to test managers. A second tool OptimATE targets a wider range of circuits like regulators and references and signal conditioning circuits and drivers.

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Living overseas

Posted on July 8, 2009 by paulmcl

People often ask me about living overseas since I have some experience of it. I was brought up in Great Britain and moved to the US twenty-five years ago (with a baby), lived in the south of France for nearly 6 years (with two small children) and have lived back in the US since then. I’ll write this assuming you are living in the US and so living overseas means living outside the US. Of course, a lot applies “the other way round” but I don’t want to have to add “or the other way round” to every sentence.

If someone is single, then the advice is really easy. Go for it. Living overseas gives you the opportunity to do two things. The first is to experience a country in a way that you never will as a tourist or business visitor. And the second is that it will change your view of the US by seeing it from overseas and seeing how other people see it. You have no real commitments and may even be able to put all your belongings in a couple of suitcases.

If you have a partner who is going to move with you, then it is much better if they will be able to work too. Otherwise your partner will have a hard time unless there is a large expat community. And if there is a large expat community, they’ll have a hard time learning the lanaguage since they’ll not need to use it. Further, the almost colonial life of the expat wives (it’s usually wives) can be very bitchy especially if a lot of them work for just one or two companies. It reminds me of Kissinger’s remark about why academic politics is so vicious. “Because the stakes are so low.” But work permits might make it hard or impossible for them to work (for example, the spouse of an H-1 visa holder in the US is not allowed to work).

If you have small children, meaning not in high school, then I’d still advise you to go. Any disruption to their education caused by changes in school systems will be more than outweighed by the education they get simply from living overseas and being immersed in a different culture.

The only time that it may be unwise to accept a position overseas is if your children are in high school, especially if they are nearly finished, and need to get the right boxes ticked to get into the right college. Also, children at that age have deeper friendships that are less easily ruptured. I’ve seen people move overseas with teenagers and they’ve had a great time; I’ve also seen sullen teenagers (but then sullen teenagers are not thin on the ground anywhere).

Depending on where you might be living, having to learn a foreign language is something that I regard as an additional positive, not something negative, especially for Americans (and other English speakers. You’ve probably heard the joke about “What do you call a person who speaks 3 languages? Trilingual. Two languages? Bilingual. One language? American.”) If you live in a foreign country for a few years, it is hard to avoid becoming fluent or at least passable in the language. If you have small children, they will amaze you by becoming almost instantly bilingual. My daughter started in the local French school speaking almost no French; within 6 months it was her language of choice for playing with her dolls or watching videos (in those days I could reel off the names of the seven dwarves in French). One bit of advice: when you return to the US they will become almost instantly monolingual again unless they get to keep using their foreign language.

You will have two sets of challenges when you arrive in a foreign country. One is that you won’t really understand the culture, and you will keep being caught out by people’s attitudes in ways that they don’t even realize are an attitude until it is pointed out. For example, here’s an American quirk only foreigners are really aware of. When you first meet them (and later too), Americans hate to leave you without an invitation to meet again—we must get together for a barbecue sometime—but usually they don’t really mean it. Other nationalities generally don’t do this, but it doesn’t mean they are less friendly.

The other challenge is practical: what is the equivalent of Safeway, Home Depot, where can I buy such-and-such a breakfast cereal (you probably can’t), where do I get a key cut. This last one caught me out in France when I was regarded as insane for expecting the hardware store where I’d just bought a lock to cut a key. Didn’t I know to go to the shoe repair shop for that? On the food front, the best is just to eat what the locals eat as much as possible and accept that it is going to be hard to get some things. If there is a large expat community then there will probably be some food store that sells American food. But it will be very expensive. And isn’t part of the fun of living in Germany, say, that you don’t have to have Skippy brand peanut-butter and can just have the wonderfully-named Erdnussmuss (ground-nut-mousse = peanut-butter) or the powerfully addictive Nutella (chocolate and hazelnut spread).

If any of you have lived overseas and would like to write a guest blog about your experience, then drop me an email (paul®greenfolder.com).

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