category: A System Perspective

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Designing In The Rain
By Jon McDonald - 23 Aug, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Jon McDonald Recently I was running some errands on my motorcycle when I got caught in the rain. Living in Florida, this is a fairly common summer occurrence. Generally, as long as it’s not too much of a deluge, I can continue through to my destination and dry off when I arrive. I always get concerned looks from those going by in their enclosed vehicles—from some, “concerned” mig... » read more

Motorcycle Diaries
By Jon McDonald - 26 Jul, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Jon McDonald I recently had reason to add another vehicle to my household. My son is starting to drive, so he's taking my car. Instead of another car I decided to get a motorcycle. I have had a couple, but it's been a few years. After much browsing I decided on a Ducati, I picked it up a few weeks ago. It has an impressive number of user adjustable electronic controls, everything from AB... » read more

Merger In Progress
By Jon McDonald - 28 Jun, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Jon McDonald June's been an interesting month, I was at the Design Automation Conference, DAC, in San Francisco, then a week later, the Freescale Technology Forum, FTF. DAC is generally more of a hardware design conference, while FTF generally is a bit more focused on software and systems. This year I was surprised at the similarities in some of the discussions at both shows. At DAC ther... » read more

Getting Ahead Of Yourself
By Jon McDonald - 24 May, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Jon McDonald Recently we've been doing some minor remodeling in our house—nothing requiring major contractors. It’s mostly smaller things that unfortunately require a significant amount of personal involvement. Over the course of the past few weeks we've had a number of "projects" that we've started, then had to undo what was done because we were interfering with another area of work. M... » read more

Smarter Design Strategies
By Jon McDonald - 26 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Jon McDonald I had an interesting discussion with a customer recently. They were involved in the architectural specification of a fairly complex piece of silicon. They spent a significant amount of time designing the part to work under worst-case power characteristics and defining the power supply requirements for the device in this worst-case use mode. The conversation started with the ... » read more

Cycle-Accurate Models?
By Jon McDonald - 22 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Jon McDonald I was sitting in a meeting this week and someone made the statement, “I have to have a cycle-accurate model.” This was a meeting discussing early delivery of system models for software development, performance and power analysis. The final RTL didn't even exist for the device in question, yet somehow the thinking was that a “cycle-accurate” model was required. I hear th... » read more

Power Matters
By Jon McDonald - 26 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Jon McDonald Power has been an active area of discussion for me recently. It's come up in a more concrete way than in past conversations: customers are more interested in discussing details and not as interested in the abstract concepts. An interesting outcome of this is that now we need more context, we need to understand what we mean when we talk about power analysis at the abstract, syst... » read more

AT vs. LT
By Jon McDonald - 15 Dec, 2011 - Comments: 0

By Jon McDonald A subject came up today that has come up on numerous occasions: “How often will the transaction-level model with timing, AT, be used versus the functional model, LT?” This is a common question; the answer is often very specific to the user. The kinds of questions and the analysis required will drive the level of accuracy required in the models. It’s probably easiest... » read more

Dinner Talk
By Jon McDonald - 17 Nov, 2011 - Comments: 0

By Jon McDonald Recently at dinner we were discussing a new video game my son wanted. My wife and I were less than thrilled with the game due to some of the adult themes I had seen in the reviews. As my son was trying to convince us that it was an acceptable game he fell back on the old standard justification: “All my friends are playing it!” This is one of the poorest reasons for anyt... » read more

Revelations From Italy
By Jon McDonald - 20 Oct, 2011 - Comments: 0

By Jon McDonald I am just back from vacation. My wife and I spent two weeks in Italy. While there we toured the Tuscan countryside, Florence and Rome. We had a rental car for the time in Tuscany. In Rome we didn’t keep the car. Watching the different types of cars and the way they were driven gave me a good analogy for an issue I’ve had a number of discussions on. As people think about ... » read more

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