Frank Schirrmeister

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Frank Schirrmeister is executive director, strategic programs, system solutions in Synopsys' System Design Group. He leads strategic activities across system software and hardware assisted development for industries like automotive, data center and 5G/6G communications, as well as for horizontals like AI/ML. Prior to Synopsys, Schirrmeister held various senior leadership positions at Arteris, Cadence Design Systems, Imperas, Chipvision and SICAN Microelectronics, focusing on product marketing and management, solutions, strategic ecosystem partner initiatives, and customer engagement. He holds an MSEE from the Technical University of Berlin and actively participates in cross-industry initiatives as chair of the Design Automation Conference's Engineering Tracks.

Author's Latest Posts

The Seven Layers Of Hardware-Software Debug
By Frank Schirrmeister - 22 Aug, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Frank Schirrmeister [caption id="attachment_9863" align="alignnone" width="639"] Seven Layers of Hardware/Software Debug[/caption] Of course I will be in trouble once this blog is posted. This post is about hardware/software debug,  and I tried to layer a set of different levels for the scope and applicability of debug. I counted seven layers, but I am sure that one may be able to arr... » read more

Increasing Certainty For 20nm Design
By Frank Schirrmeister - 25 Jul, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Frank Schirrmeister At the recent Design Automation Conference two topics were getting very special attention: Design at 20nm and System-Level Design. This is very indicative of the very opposite trends we have been facing in semiconductor designs for the last couple of decades. On the one hand, the actual design units get smaller and smaller, and we are today happily designing for technolo... » read more

How Firm Is Firmware?
By Frank Schirrmeister - 26 Jun, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Frank Schirrmeister When blogging recently about Xilinx’s presentation at the Cadence DAC 2012 EDA360 theater, which was given by Dave Beal, I ran across the diagram he had used to outline the “development stack” from hardware to software. Dave had described a virtual prototype to the audience as a functional model that recreates the WHAT rather than the HOW, duplicating the result ... » read more

Endless Abstractions?
By Frank Schirrmeister - 22 May, 2012 - Comments: 1

By Frank SchirrmeisterHaving started my own career doing full custom layout, then moving though gates and RTL to transactions and embedded software, I always was a little bit concerned whether the industry would eventually run out of abstraction levels for me to adopt further upwards. It looks like there is plenty of head room.Last week I was in Munich attending the CDNLive! EMEA event. I was h... » read more

Picking The Right Processor
By Frank Schirrmeister - 24 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 1

By Frank Schirrmeister In an embedded system, the sole connection point between the software and the hardware is the processor. Somewhere right now the effort to develop software for a complex System-on-Chip (SoC) is surpassing the effort of developing the chip itself. As I pointed out in my recent description of the Design West conference in San Jose, complex ecosystems of related content, to... » read more

“Selling System-Level Design”
By Frank Schirrmeister - 20 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Frank Schirrmeister Between reviewing what happened in 2011, trying to predict what 2012 will have in store, and planning activity for the system-level design product line I am working on at Cadence, I ran across my notes and the summary of Jeff Cox’s book “Selling the Wheel”. As Silicon Valley high tech marketers we all have been accustomed to Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Ch... » read more

Are Hardware Developers From Mars And Software Developers From Jupiter?
By Frank Schirrmeister - 21 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Frank Schirrmeister In a recent discussion fellow Blogger Kurt Shuler, when talking about hardware and software designers, said something along the lines “Given languages like Verilog, both hardware and software developers really do software, for hardware designers the software is just getting fixed much sooner.” I intuitively agreed with him, but his comment inspired this post in which... » read more

The Art Of Double-Indirect Sales And Product Marketing
By Frank Schirrmeister - 24 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Frank Schirrmeister The interaction between software and hardware development has been much discussed, with early software enablement being at the forefront of what system-level design in EDA tries to enable. The main reason why these discussions are so attractive to EDA – in my mind – is the impression that the number of software developers is significantly higher than that of hardware... » read more

All I Want For Christmas … Is A Census Of Software Developers!
By Frank Schirrmeister - 14 Dec, 2011 - Comments: 0

By Frank SchirrmeisterThe year is almost over and in my homeland of Germany, kids are preparing to appease Santa Claus and Knecht Ruprecht (the guy who gives you a rod if you misbehaved during the year) with a Christmas rhyme. I remember that as a kid, I was at one point reciting from memory the second chapter from the book of Luke: “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census... » read more

Mapping Out The Value Of TLM Modeling
By Frank Schirrmeister - 16 Nov, 2011 - Comments: 1

I have written about the value of system-level design and moving up to next level of abstraction numerous times. This fall one of the most interesting steps of progress towards effective system-level design and emphasis on the importance of embedded software has been made by the two big FPGA vendors Altera and Xilinx. Both vendors have announced devices combining programmable logic of up to sev... » read more

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