Blog Review: Dec. 4

Mentor’s Harry Foster closes his epic study on functional verification with an interesting insight about the real value of industry studies—new questions. It’s hard to argue with that.

Cadence’s Brian Fuller takes a shot at the people taking shots at Amazon’s drone delivery service (the term du jour is robots). It does sound cool, as long as they don’t deliver the kind of payloads that made drones infamous.

Synopsys’ Richard Solomon finds a popular burger in France that’s made with foie gras, a decadent concoction made by force-feeding a duck or goose. Some people—the state of California, among them—liken this to waterboarding a bird.

ARM’s Drew Barbier points to a video about how to shrink an open-source Arduino development board to fit on your fingertip and make it wireless. This adds some interesting possibilities to the Internet of Things.

Applied Materials’ Gill Lee says that 3D NAND is a reality now that traditional planar shrinks have run out of steam. This may leave you reminiscing about the good old days when the world was flat.

Mentor’s Colin Walls points a fire extinguisher at the idea that embedded software works out of the box. Context plays a big role here.

ARM’s Cara Forsythe points to an article in The Register that details the company’s history, including Apple’s role in rescuing it from obscurity with, of all things, the Newton—Apple’s first attempt at a smart phone minus the phone part.

Cadence’s Richard Goering pulls some nuggets out of the company’s recent signoff summit, notably that signoff has become the latest bottleneck in physical design. Complexity has a price tag, and it’s not the consumer who pays for it.

Meanwhile, another Synopsys foodie, Mick Posner, cut his blog short last week to sleep off a turkey dinner. This may be a unique U.S. tradition.

Mentor’s Hollis Blanchard looks at the relationship between co-workers Bob and Alice. Seems they’re on speaking terms again.

ARM’s Anand Patel discusses fragment performance and all of the different things that can affect it, such as your battery, bandwidth, CPU performance.

Cadence’s Arthur Marris details some big advances in Ethernet standards. There are some rather grim photos of the Dallas book depository to go along with it, too, taken right outside the hotel where progress was being reported on the new standards.