Standard Time And The Day Of Two Noons


Many of you know that I have a kind of fascination with dates, times and the way they have changed over time. Everyone measured time by using the sun 150 years ago, and while this may not have been highly accurate – well, who cared? Farmers got up when the sun rose and did their stuff until the sun set. Most people had no need for time and the idea of a watch would have been..well…untimely.... » read more

A Formally Free Lunch


I am sure many of you can remember the successful events staged by [getperson id="11679" p_name="Eric Hennenhofer"], founder and CEO of [getentity id="22813" comment="Obsidian Software"]. While neither his name nor that of his company may be on the tip of your tongue, DVClub might ring a few more bells. He started it so that he could have a place to meet fellow engineers while enjoying a free l... » read more

Legal Battlefield In Emulation


Given the rate of research and development within the EDA industry, you might expect it to be a highly litigious industry, but apart from theft claims, there have not been that many law suits brought to bear – except in the area of [getkc id="30" comment="emulation"]. Emulation has, since its early days in the early 1990s, always been a legal battlefield, and the hostilities continue to this ... » read more

Conferences, Education And The Press


The EDA industry once organized itself around conferences. The Design Automation Conference (DAC) marked the time of the year when new product announcements came out thick and fast, and it was difficult to keep up with the stream of press releases. Companies with nothing to announce were viewed as deficient. New products were demonstrated in secrecy in the back rooms of the suites at the confer... » read more

EDA Suffering Funding Crisis


The EDA industry has been built on venture funding ever since its inception in the early eighties and it is no secret that the big three have relied on a steady stream of startup companies to provide some of the new ideas, to test out new technologies and expand the industry. While there is a lot of research and development that goes on inside the large companies, most of this is related to ... » read more

Solving A Problem In Reverse


It has been a while since I selected a [getkc id="16" comment="patent"] just because of the humorous side it presents. Today, I will remedy that and talk about a patent that would appear to solve exactly the opposite problem that most people have. It is related to the use of chopsticks. While I am fairly dexterous at using them these days, there was a time when the food would be cold before I h... » read more

Programming Is Not Patentable


I have written about problems with the [getkc id="16" kc_name="patent"] systems several times in the past and have also talked about a very important case that has been making its way through the courts. This one case, Alice Corp versus CLS, has been particularly closely followed because of the importance of its conclusion on software patents. On June 19 the Supreme Court came to its conclusion... » read more

The Circle Of Test And EDA Is Complete


For those of you who were around and involved with EDA back in the early ’80s, you may remember that chip design was not the focus. It was the board that received most of the attention. Chips were small and did not require much in the way of functional verification. [getkc id="29" kc_name="Synthesis"] had not been invented and so gate-level design was where everything happened, and much of th... » read more

Ivy League Colleges Crumbling


Last week I attended a talk from David Pearce Snyder. Snyder is a data-based forecaster, or what some people call a futurist. He has consulted for many Fortune 500 companies and the government. This is part of a lecture series put on by the Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy and I got to attend because [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"] is a sponsor of these talk... » read more

We Are All Vulnerable


Target, Neiman Marcus, Michaels. We are all familiar with the huge loss of personal and financial data from these establishments. A lot more people are fuming over the data being accessed by the NSA. While we only know the details as leaked by Edward Snowden, this has to be the biggest data breach in history with the government having hacked into the data centers of Google, Yahoo and who knows ... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →