Blog Review: Sept. 9

Doulos’ John Aynsley explains in a guest blog for Aldec why FPGA designers need to know SystemVerilog and UVM. Might be time to increase the coffee budget.

Speaking of verification, Cadence’s Frank Schirrmeister notes that his company is joining forces with Mentor Graphics and Breker for a contribution to the Accellera Portable Stimulus Working Group. This is potentially a big deal in verification because the PSWG’s charter is to develop a standard for a single spec that will be portable from IP to full system.

Rambus’ Aharon Etengoff shines some light on triboelectric nanogenerators, which can be used for energy harvesting in wearable devices. If this technology goes mainstream, it will have a huge impact on design.

ANSYS’ Bill Vandermark sifts through the top five engineering articles of the week and finds a new standard in camera resolution: 3.2 gigipixels. The camera is being developed by the U.S. Department of Energy. Check out the megadrone, too. This could be the next traffic nightmare.

Mentor’s John McMillan points to a radio with a PCB layout in the shape of the London Underground map. Quick, fetch the solder iron. There’s a short in Charing Cross.

Synopsys’ Mick Posner explains a recent act of censorship—this one by his own company.

NXP’s Christopher Hill examines the use of thermal simulations and how it can be used to understand the flow of heat within a system over time.

ARM’s Brian Fuller looks back on a week of multicore discussions ranging from Qualcomm’s new 14nm Kryo processor to what’s happening in the IoT.

Synopsys’ Nasib Naser digs into how to skip initialization with memory IP and still maintain proper behavior model.

Cadence’s Christine Young reports back on a speech by ClioSoft’s Karim Khalfan about how to improve collaboration within a mixed-signal design team.

Fabien Laurier and Hannah Safford, from the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, point to a new high-res satellite imagery being used to produce digital elevation models of Alaska and the Arctic. This is a serious number of megapixels and processing power.

And in case you missed last week’s IoT & Security newsletter, here are some noteworthy blogs:

Technology Editor Ernest Worthman contends that malvertising is not just e-junk anymore because it’s taking a big bite out of the entire advertising industry, in The Growing Price Of A Click.

Executive Editor Ann Steffora Mutschler finds automotive security challenges are rising, but so are the solutions to protect against them, in Securing The Car.

Kilopass’ Linh Hong predicts that winners in the IoT market will be secure devices that are extremely low power, inexpensive, and have multiple applications onboard, in Today IoT Is Cool, Tomorrow IoT Can Change Mankind.

Mentor Graphics’ Anne Cirkel notes that we’ve moved beyond dropped calls and the next phase is much more interesting, in IoT’s 3 Big Demands On The Semiconductor Industry.

NXP’s Brintha Koeter finds the number of choices for securing identities is on the rise, but so is the number of attacks, in How To Prevent Identity Theft.

Industry luminaries Bernard Murphy and Jim Hogan argue that for the automotive market, chips need to last a lot longer than they do in a phone, in Quality And Safety In Automotive Electronics: Venturing Beyond ISO-26262.