Blog Review: May 21

Mentor’s Colin Walls offers up some new insights into C++ exception handling, thanks to some input from colleague Jonathan Roelofs. This one involves minimizing overhead and reducing runtime penalties.

Synopsys’ Mick Posner is back in the saddle again—literally. This is about as green as it gets.

Cadence’s Arthur Marris reports back on the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standards meeting, including the first gathering of the 400G project task force. That should speed things up.

Ansys’ Justin Nescott ferrets out the five most interesting engineering stories of the week. Check out the hover bike. It could make the tire pump obsolete.

ARM’s Lori Kate Smith reports back from the Maker Faire. Check out the 3D printing part. This could end holiday shopping forever. Those machines can even make food.

Mentor’s Michael Ford argues that expensive enterprise resource planning systems don’t cut it in keeping track of materials across the supply chain. Try explaining that to the CFO.

Cadence’s Brian Fuller trumpets the upcoming Embedded Vision Summit—the one where sensors are used to see and computers are used to make sense of that data. This is interesting stuff, particularly in light of the fact that it will have a huge impact on everyone’s lives. Think driverless vehicles.

ARM’s Brian Cline points to an important security issue to consider with the IoT: getting spammed by machines such as a refrigerator. Stay tuned for the panel at DAC.

Mentor’s Mathew Clark rolls out a new blog focused on thermal testing, the first one looking at questions about how to conduct a good test and what questions to consider.

Ansys’ Lionel Tomaso reports back on a French conference for robust and reliable design. One very interesting idea: Combining kriging regressions and Monte Carlo simulations.

And in case you missed last week’s Manufacturing, Design & Test newsletter, here are some noteworthy blogs:

Executive Editor Mark LaPedus says chipmakers have stopped beating the 450mm drums.

Mentor Graphics’ David Abercrombie compares SADP to a Rorschach ink blot test, with good reason.

Applied Materials’ Kavita Shah observes that interconnect performance and reliability are getting progressively more difficult to maintain at each successive process node.

Patterning guru Mike Watts looks at what will replace feature shrinking after 2020.

SEMI’s Paula Doe scopes out the changes ahead for micro-electro-mechanical systems.

And Semico Research’s Adrienne Downey says there’s good reason to get excited about 3D printing revolution ahead.