Blog Review: Jan. 21

Mentor’s John Day attended the IBM talk at last week’s Automotive News World Congress in Detroit. The upshot: The automotive industry is ripe for disruptive changes, but autonomous vehicles aren’t likely to be part of those changes.

Cadence’s Axel Scherer spins a tale of movie and electronic magic, with a little debug technology thrown in—and notes how quickly things that seemed magical a short time ago are not so magical anymore. Is that progress or rapid adaptation?

Synopsys’ S. Prashanth digs into verification IP for transaction modeling and why there’s such a close link between an efficient transaction model and the VIP.

Ansys’ Justin Nescott identifies the top five engineering articles of the week. Check out the tool booths that weigh vehicles and harvest energy from them.

ARM’s Alban Rampon looks at some of the planned developments for 2015, notably a new public group for use cases and topic areas to be launched next month.

Mentor’s Michael Ford questions whether off-the-shelf software is good enough for manufacturing, particularly in light of the fact that everyone seems to want something different.

Cadence’s Uwe Simm points to some lazy test cases for tool failures and how to shrink the failing environment to something that’s more manageable.

Ansys’ Jim Cashman announces the hall of fame winners from the company’s competition. There’s some really interesting R&D work going on around the globe, including how to calculate variations in bone density and how to replace welds with bolts using controlled tightening.

And in case you missed the most recent Low Power-High Performance newsletter, here are some standout blogs:

Cadence’s Brian Fuller found some hidden gems and unanswered questions in the chaos of the Consumer Electronics Show.

Mentor’s Mathew Clark provides a tutorial on how to improve the reliability of systems and identify where problems are likely to show up.

Synopsys’ Hezi Saar contends that smartphone developers must integrate interface IP that’s optimized for power, cost, and time-to market.

Ansys-Apache’s Annapoorna Krishnaswamy finds the need for ubiquitous connectivity has created a need for systematic IP verification and validation.

Rambus’ Loren Shalinsky looks at what better TV resolution means for bandwidth, and what happens when we add 8K.

Atrenta’s Larry Vivolo concludes that death is not an option for design teams, but neither is insufficient verification coverage.

Calypto’s Anand Iyer contends that low power is about to go mainstream for design teams as the need for building efficiency into designs continues to grow.

Executive Editor Ann Steffora Mutschler questions whether all the attention being paid to the automotive sector in regard to electronic content, translates into CES becoming the next must-see auto show.