Blog Review: April 1

A Russian plan to build a massive cargo plane to deliver tanks at supersonic speed—A roll of tape coated in squid proteins provides perfect camouflage—A yacht made of volcanic fibers battling the world’s roughest seas: Ansys’ Justin Nescott finds everything for a James Bond movie in this week’s top tech articles.

Writing for Synopsys, Broadcom’s Hari Balisetty looks at reusable sequences in UVM with the aim of ensuring that you don’t end up writing one sequence for every scenario from scratch. This would be a reversal to a directed testing methodology that was abandoned for good reason.

The CFD industry recently hit a major milestone: $1B in aggregate annual revenue. To celebrate the occasion, Mentor’s Keith Hanna begins a broad analysis of trends in the commercial CFD market.

If you’re looking for anything from CDNLive, this post from Cadence’s Richard Goering is the place to start. A plethora of presentations are available, plus an index of Cadence blogs covering the event.

A video from ARM’s Hobson Bullman shares the judging panel of a Raspberry Pi competition that drew over 150 entries from schools across the UK.

In introducing his new blog, Cadence’s Dave Pursley is direct: it’s high time for more high-level synthesis discussion. Well, direct until he poses a history challenge to name the startup where he got his HLS start. The KC can help.

Clean diesel is powered by more than better fuels. Ansys’ Aleksandra Egelja-Maruszewski lifts the hood on new emission control technologies that are proving just as essential.

In six months, U.S. credit cards will get a big security boost. But October isn’t the end of the line, warns Rambus’ Aharon Etengoff. There is much more work to be done.

And in case you missed last week’s System-Level Design newsletter, here are some noteworthy blogs:

Editor In Chief Ed Sperling observes that constraints in manufacturing could lead to some unexpected consequences.

Technology Editor Brian Bailey questions the last time the legal world noticed what was going on in EDA, and points to why it should.

Open-Silicon’s Khushal Gondaliya explains how ring oscillators can be used to validate signoff methodology and silicon process.

Synopsys’ Tom De Schutter travels to China to find Chinese semiconductor companies focused on early software development for a competitive edge.

Mentor Graphics’ John Park notes that as complexity grows, trying to figure everything out on a spreadsheet becomes a monumental task.

Cadence’s Frank Schirrmeister contends that wearables are just a stepping-stone toward a much bigger trend, with broad implications for society.

Sonics’ Randy Smith notes there are only four primary failure modes associated with NoCs.

eSilicon’s Mike Gianfagna sees a huge opportunity around the globe for the IoT.

Arteris’ Kurt Shuler compares the interconnect fabric in an SoC to the human central nervous system.