Career Transitions


Many people change their career path, sometimes to take on new challenges, sometimes following opportunity or money. As we learn, we develop both expertise and skill sets and in many cases expertise in one area has diminished value in another, meaning that it becomes more difficult to switch as we get older. But there are times when both knowledge and skills can be fully transferred, making the... » read more

Design Tool Think Tank Required


When I was in the EDA industry as a technologist, there were three main parts to my role. The first was to tell customers about new technologies being developed and tool extensions that would be appearing in the next release. These were features they might find beneficial both in the projects they were undertaking today, and even more so, would apply to future projects. Second, I would try and ... » read more

Respect? Confused


In a recent story, I talked about how EDA has gained respect in the financial markets, which is something it has failed to do for decades. EDA, in the eyes of Wall Street, had become a plodder through good times and bad, failing to achieve the growth shown by semiconductor companies or foundries, or the rapid rise to glory of other software companies. Of course, it never experienced the same de... » read more

What You Needed To Know In 2023


I always use the last blog of the year to review everything published in the Systems & Design and Low Power – High Performance channels of Semiconductor Engineering, the two channels that I write for. It is useful to see what interests you and, as I have found in the past, it is an indicator of where the industry is going. You read about the issues you are facing as designers, and you nee... » read more

The Good Old Days Of EDA


Nostalgia is wonderful, but there is something about being involved in the formative years of an industry. Few people ever get to experience it, and it was probably one of the most fortuitous events to have happened in my life. Back in the early '80s, little in the way of design automation existed. There were a few gate- and transistor-level simulators, primarily for test and a few 'calculators... » read more

The Limits Of AI-Generated Models


In several recent stories, the subject of models has come up, and one recurrent theme is that AI may be able to help us generate models of a required abstraction. While this may be true in some cases, it is very dangerous in others. If we generalize, AI should be good for any model where the results are predominantly continuous, but discontinuities create problems. Unless those are found and... » read more

The Federation Needs A Taxonomy


While putting together the story about federated simulation, it brought back memories of an earlier part of my career when I spent a lot of time looking at modeling abstractions and simulation frameworks. In the mid-1990s, the notions of re-using pre-designed blocks of IP started to become popular, but the fledgling industry was in disarray. Every IP block had a different set of deliverables... » read more

Predicting The Future For Semiconductors


Is it possible to predict the future? Of course not. We all make projections of what happened in the past, where they are now, and the implications for the future. We bias that in various ways and think we are making some astounding revelation, which is highly unlikely to become true. Of course, by luck, some people get it right and they are bestowed with grand accolades and awards. The likelih... » read more

Are In-Person Conferences Sustainable?


DAC/Semicon are now over, and while I missed a large part of it due to a stomach bug, I increasingly have a stale taste in my mouth about in-person conferences in general. Let's split things up – an event such as DAC is both an academic conference and a trade show. It has been that way almost since its inception 60 years ago. There are many other conferences that are pure conferences, and the... » read more

The True Cost Of Software Changes


Safety and security are considered to be important in a growing number of markets and applications. Guidelines are put in place for the processes used to develop either the hardware or the software, but what they seem to ignore is that neither exists in a vacuum. They form a system when put together. Back when I was developing tools for hardware-software co-verification, there were fairly co... » read more

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