DAC Day One: EDA Through Different Glasses


DAC is back in Austin after being away for three years. The weather improved for our arrival after the bad thunderstorms of the past couple of weeks. The sun came out and started to heat everything up. With water still pooling around the place, it was somewhat humorous to see a bus pass with the slogan "Think about Austin without water." DAC starts, as it always has in my memory, with a pres... » read more

DAC On Cars


With the yearly Design Automation Conference upon us in mere days, I’ve been combing through the program looking for sessions to attend in between already-scheduled roundtables I’m running, speakers I am introducing here and here, a panel I’m moderating, along with other meetings. You might imagine I’ve got my eye on the automotive sessions starting with the opening keynote. It's... » read more

Preparations for DAC


The 53rd DAC is just days away now and the program is pretty well established at this point. It is returning to Austin after a couple of years in San Francisco. In 2013 it was held in this location for the first time and there was a herculean effort to bring the local design community to the event. They did amazing well and while attendance fell slightly compared to the previous year in San Die... » read more

The Top Five Trends in Verification to Watch for at DAC 2016


The Design Automation Conference in Austin is upon us, so it's time for my annual preview of what to look for. In my mind, five trends stand out and are clearly visible in the DAC program as well as in what we are presenting at our booth: Stronger ties between verification engines Software-driven verification with portable stimulus Metric-driven verification Application specificity ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


IP & Chips Synopsys debuted MIPI I3CSM controller IP, which incorporates in-band interrupts within the 2-wire interface to deliver low pin count. The IP supports all data rates up to 26.7 Mbps, dynamic address allocation, multi-master operations and 32-bit ARM AMBA Advanced Peripheral Bus slave interface. Marvell unveiled a family of Ethernet transceivers fully optimized for 2.5Gbps a... » read more

How Long Until You Can Take A Self-Driving Car To DAC?


There is no hotter topic in tech than self-driving cars. How else to explain the worldwide headlines after what can only be described as a modest little fender-bender last month in Mountain View. The culprit was one of Alphabet Inc.’s autonomous Lexus 450h's, by now a media darling/goat. Despite the apparent and very prosaic facts — the Lexus was traveling 2 miles per hour, nobody was hurt,... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Tools Synopsys unveiled a new custom design solution targeting FinFET layout, introducing visually-assisted routing automation, a built-in design rule checking engine, templates to apply previous layout decisions to new designs, and IC Compiler integration. TSMC certified the new tool for 10nm and 7nm FinFET process technologies. It has also been adopted by STMicroelectronics, GSI Technology... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Know someone who deserves the Phil Kaufman Award for Distinguished Contributions to EDA? Nominations are open until June 30th. Tools, IP & Chips ARM debuted the Cortex-R8 processor, targeting mass storage devices and future 5G modems with a quad-core configuration and extended low-latency memory. Cadence's schematic design tool, OrCAD Capture, added the capability to export hierarc... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Events DAC is now accepting nominations for the Marie R. Pistilli Women in EDA Achievement Award, which recognizes individuals who have visibly helped to advance the profile of women in the EDA industry. Nominations must be received by March 3rd. Tools Cadence unveiled its new Modus Test Solution, which the company says enables design engineers to achieve an up to 3X reduction in test ... » read more

DAC Finds A New Voice


DAC stands for Design Automation Conference. Everyone: please stop saying “the DAC conference”. This may not be as widespread as folks calling an automated teller machine an ATM machine, although it’s still odd. But I digress… This year, the 53rd DAC will be held in Austin, Texas starting June 5. I’ve been going to DAC for more years than I will ever put in writing. I’ve seen so... » read more

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