Blog Review: June 18


Mentor’s Vern Wnek recalls “a living hell” of being trapped in a small office for three weeks with a PCB designer who ate too much garlic and sweated profusely. This could be a reality TV series. What do engineers really think about UVM? Cadence's Richard Goering braved a 7 a.m. breakfast at DAC to hear a panel of experts, including reps from Intel, Ericsson, Imagination and Freescale,... » read more

Kicking Off DAC 2015


The DAC executive committee closed the 51st DAC last Friday. And guess what? Right afterward we had the first planning meeting for next year’s conference, for which I’ll serve as General Chair. Because most attendees don’t really get a glimpse behind the curtain into these sorts of activities, I thought I’d experiment by blogging my way to next June in San Francisco. I plan to publis... » read more

Beyond The DAC Keynote


The Design Automation Conference is split into a number of tracks, such as IP, automotive, embedded software and security, and these overlay the main EDA track. One of these themes overlays the first day of DAC, and this year that honor goes to IP. That means that the first keynote of the conference comes from the IP industry, and this is rather fitting given the importance IP is having for ... » read more

Blog Review: June 11


eSilicon’s Jack Harding says that EDA and semiconductors need to focus heavily on recruiting the next generation of brilliant engineers. This technology is cool, and even better it makes all the other cool technology work. It’s time to remind the rest of the world. Cadence’s Brian Fuller distills a panel discussion at DAC on computer vision—the sensors that enable driverless cars, a... » read more

Blog Review: June 4


Sonics' Drew Wingard looks at the challenges of IP integration, from standards to re-use to the need for intelligence on the network. Given the focus on IP integration, as well as the myriad challenges, this is very timely information. ARM's Karthik Ranjan has an interesting theory about why Java developers wear glasses. Ansys' Justin Nescott unearths the five most interesting engineering... » read more

DAC Day One


The Design Automation Confeence got off to a roaring start today and the Synopsys breakfast and keynote were standing room only. The Synopsys breakfast brought together foundry (Samsung), IP developer (Arm) and tool provider (Synopsys) to talk about the growing requirements of ecosystems and partnership in order to make new processes available for production usage. Perhaps the most surprisin... » read more

Elementary Not Too Early To Encourage Girls In Math And Science


Dr. Diana Marculescu, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University is this year’s recipient of the Marie R. Pistilli Women in Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Achievement Award, which honors Dr. Marculescu for her leadership and for providing a role model to women in engineering through both her research and her teaching. Semiconductor Engineering spoke wit... » read more

Opening Salvo At DAC


As always, DAC starts with a view of the state of the industry from Gary Smith and this year, Smith's view was a little different from previous years. For DAC 51, Smith no longer spoke of ESL as being the key to the future. In fact, he conceded that he may have been off a few years or a couple of decades on that one, but in the end he was right. This year his main message seemed to be that k... » read more

What’s New At DAC This Year


By Michelle Clancy If you’re in EDA, it’s not hard to tell that DAC will start in less than 15 days. There is an abundance of activity busting out of every EDA company. But with all that is going on, please take note of what is new on the exhibit floor and networking events at the show. Both the exhibits and the networking are key reasons for attending DAC. Complementing the all-embraci... » read more

Taming The PDK Beast At DAC


A quick Web search on the phrase “process design kit” reveals about 48 million matches. This happens to be about 10 times larger than for the current pop dance sensation “twerking,” so I guess that’s at least something to brag about. Yet if we now add the word interoperability to our PDK search, we find only 200K matches, or less than 0.5% — and therein exposes the chronic problem w... » read more

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