Jon McDonald

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Jon McDonald is a technical marketing engineer for the design and creation business at Mentor Graphics.

Author's Latest Posts

Why Your iPhone Battery Doesn’t Last
By Jon McDonald - 22 Apr, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Jon McDonald The other day a friend asked about the battery life on my iPhone. I love the phone by the way; he was disappointed with how often he had to recharge his. I responded with the one thing I had tried—turn off the Bluetooth. With that one change I have been pretty happy with the time between charges. His question got me thinking about the battery life of the phone, and I start... » read more

Insurance, Doctors And ESL
By Jon McDonald - 25 Mar, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Jon McDonald Return on investment is a subject that comes up frequently when people are thinking about adopting higher-level design approaches. After all, we are talking about adding work—we need to model, design, simulate and analyze the system. All of these tasks take time and cost money. So what are we getting in return? Before we can think about the return, we have to identify wha... » read more

Irrational Exuberance Meets High-Level Design
By Jon McDonald - 25 Feb, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Jon McDonald Irrational exuberance is running rampant. Design managers believe all their systems engineers and software programmers are going to be able to drive the hardware design process from a high-level description. OK, perhaps irrational exuberance is a bit strong and it may not be quite rampant, but I’ve heard statements recently both from customers and suppliers pushing in th... » read more

Carpentry Lessons Applied To ESL
By Jon McDonald - 28 Jan, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Jon McDonald Electronic system level design and analysis. How many tools fall under this general description? How many languages are applied in the various stages of system design and analysis? I was recently preparing for a customer presentation in which we were covering most of Mentor’s tools in this area—not all of Mentor’s tools, but a subset of the tools related to the syste... » read more

Estimates, Spreadsheets And Abstract Models
By Jon McDonald - 17 Dec, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Jon McDonald Lies, damn lies and statistics. Occasionally I get the impression that some engineers feel we’ve just taken that step beyond statistics in our ESL modeling. In a recent discussion I was very pointedly reminded of the subjective nature of abstract design and analysis. Like most predictions, you don’t really know what’s going to happen until it actually comes to pass. Us... » read more

An ESL Measurement Epiphany
By Jon McDonald - 19 Nov, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Jon McDonald Sometimes something becomes so simple and clear it’s shocking. I recently experienced such an epiphany. It started with a typical discussion on hardware software relationships and tradeoffs. How do you know what should be done in which? Realistically there is no automatic method to determine the proper partition. The best we can do is to propose a potential solution, the... » read more

A High-Level Model For Reducing Frustration
By Jon McDonald - 24 Sep, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Jon McDonald Earlier this week I was sitting in the airport waiting for my flight 
to depart. I was connecting through Atlanta. This happened to be one of the days that Atlanta was receiving heavy rains causing flooding 
and occasionally closing the airport. First the flight to Atlanta was 
delayed an hour, then two, then three. Meanwhile my connecting flight 
had been c... » read more

What’s New And What Isn’t In ESL
By Jon McDonald - 27 Aug, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Jon McDonald Just because a problem can be solved doesn’t mean it has been solved. Last week I was on a panel at the ISLPED conference in San Francisco. This conference is focused on low power, and the panel addressed some of the things that are being done and some things needed for low power analysis exploration and trade-offs. While the panel was very interesting, one question that... » read more

How to Future-Proof A Hardware Designer
By Jon McDonald - 31 Jul, 2009 - Comments: 0

I’m at DAC this week, where there is a lot of interest and discussion on what’s going on in design and what’s going to happen to designers. One conversation with a university professor gave me a “eureka” moment. The professor had a student who really loved RTL design. The student asked him where he could get a job doing this, and the professor suggested the student move to India... » read more

ESL…Is It What You Want Or What You Need?
By Jon McDonald - 25 Jun, 2009 - Comments: 0

Last week I was sitting in a meeting having an extended discussion on what information and benefits could be derived from an ESL transaction model of a system.  It reminded me of the words of those immortal philosophers, The Rolling Stones, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find, you get what you need”.  I believe this is a philosophy that ne... » read more

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