Author's Latest Posts


The Rise Of The Subsystem And New IP Providers


By Frank Schirrmeister From the perspective of system development in EDA, the customer landscape and its changes have always had a fascinating influence on our tools. NVIDIA’s recent announcement in a corporate blog post that they will be licensing the Kepler GPU architecture caused me to check again on the customer landscape for which we are enabling system development, for example, with ou... » read more

Software-Driven Electronic Design Automation


As the EDA industry prepares to descend on Austin in less than two weeks for the 50th annual Design Automation Conference (DAC), I am wondering what this DAC will be about. It’s pretty simple. One of the key themes will be about “software-driven EDA,” a term I’d love to claim to have invented but am happy to attribute to Jim Ready of Ready Systems and Montavista fame – our chief techn... » read more

Subsystems And Reuse


By Frank Schirrmeister The last couple of weeks have been very busy with travel, customer meetings and presentations—DATE in Grenoble, CDNLive in San Jose and, most recently, EDPS in Monterey. Software enablement and IP sub-systems have been the key themes throughout these events, and during Gary Smith’s keynote at EDPS, I realized that subsystem reuse may be a significant step to solving ... » read more

Trying To Catch Up With Software Developers


By Frank Schirrmeister The electronic design automation (EDA) industry has now been trying for at least a decade and a half to catch up with software developers, for two main reasons. First, there are so many of them that it would be great to expand EDA into that domain. Second, semiconductor companies, i.e. the core customers to which the EDA industry sells, have had to add more and more soft... » read more

Development Tools Enabling The Internet of Things


I'm at the Embedded World conference in Nuremberg this week. Yes, between Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and DVCon in San Jose, Calif., I chose Embedded World. Unfettered by unseasonally late snow and bad weather, it turns out this was the right decision. I have not attended this show for a couple of years and am pleased to find that the show has developed quite a bit. There are more than 8... » read more

It’s The Data, Stupid!


By Frank Schirrmeister January is prediction month! After writing my 10 year Look-Back on Technology last week, I attended an IDC briefing called “Riding the Momentum: IDC Software Predictions 2013.” IDC is looking at the IT world from four angles that they call four pillars: Cloud, Big Data/Analytics, Social Business and Mobility. In the opening presentation—called “In a Diverse Wo... » read more

Looking Back At 2012


By Frank Schirrmeister This my last post in this Blog for this year and it is time to look back at the year and try to see what’s next. How fast time flies became clear in a funny way to me this morning when listening to the “Tagesschau” while showering – the 8pm news I grew up with back in Germany – courtesy of modern video Blog technology. Apparently the parking fines in inner citi... » read more

The Agony Of Choice


By Frank Schirrmeister In my last post on “The Complexity of System Development and Verification” I outlined five main use models for verification at four levels of scope, enabled by seven execution engines. So how exactly do users choose between the different execution engines to run hardware and software together before the actual chip is available? It is far from trivial. The seven engi... » read more

The Complexity Of System Development And Verification


By Frank Schirrmeister The electronics industry is undergoing a fast transition towards new paradigms for system development and verification as traditional development methods reach their breaking points. Developing a system development and verification environment can become a costly undertaking, and can involve many direct and sometimes even more hidden cost. To understand the cost aspects,... » read more

On Design Productivity And Cost of Ownership …


By Frank Schirrmeister Last weekend I spent time with my 7 ½-year-old daughter (the ½ is crucially important at that age) on our tree house project. Well, it is more a tree “deck” so far, which is quite respectable though given that we just started building it in one weekend (as the book I quickly downloaded that evening on the iPad actually recommended). A project like this gives endles... » read more

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