Blog Review: April 9

Mentor’s Colin Walls discovered an interesting video of the software programming learning process—a teacher responding literally to commands from his students on how to make a jam sandwich. It’s harder than it looks.

Cadence’s Brian Fuller captures a speech by his colleague, Sanjiv Taneja, about the need for a comprehensive verification approach and smart IP reuse. The overriding theme is that the traditional innovation model is under stress.

Synopsys’ Graham Allan provides a useful tidbit about where to find good information on DDR, and another absolutely useless but rather funny discussion about memory on primetime TV. Bookmark the useful one, but definitely check out the other one.

Ansys’ Marius Rosu takes a look at the new state of the art for electric motor design. This isn’t the simple motor you used to be able to buy in a catalog. It’s an amazing piece of engineering.

ARM’s Juergen Jagst examines the Advance Driver Assistance Systems and where it comes into play in future automobiles. When it comes to quick decisions, we really are inferior to machines. But process variation and electromigration don’t seem to be as much of a problem in people.

Cadence’s Richard Goering drills into formal verification, which is now moving to the SoC level for memory and register maps. Formal is evolving.

Synopsys’ Mick Posner brings martial arts together with FPGA design. This is a new approach to pulverizing the competition.

ARM’s John Fry introduces software-defined and virtualized networking, concepts that you will no doubt be hearing lots more about with the Internet of Things. This is a whole new twist on mesh networks.

Cadence’s Scott Jacobsen is back with part three of his talk on the memory wall, this one focusing on 3D memory. He rattles off some comparative specs in this video that are worth noting.

ARM’s Dominic Pajak interviews Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton about the new embedded compute module for industrial applications. This may be the ultimate application for shrinking features.