A Connected Resolution


Let me first start off with wishing everyone a belated but great New Year! I wish everyone good health and a lot of friendship. And hopefully all those software driven devices around you will make your life better. At least that is the goal and the promise from the industry. I’m a big believer in the benefits of a “connected” future. The Internet of Things really has the potential to i... » read more

10 Years Later—Will Project Delays Stop Faster Technology Innovation?


Every January I enjoy looking back 10 years to learn from the past, consider implications for the future, and have fun picking the worst prediction that did not come true. This year I even can combine my annual trip to the garage where I keep some January issues of IEEE Spectrum with reviewing my own blogging. Five years ago in 2009, I did my first “10-year-lookback” that I called “Bac... » read more

Virtual Prototypes For Early Software Development


This white paper examines tthe challenges of developing some of the hardware-dependent software layers - namely boot ROM code, OS bring-up, driver development - used in fast-evolving mobile devices and how to use virtual prototypes to: Start developing software far in advance of hardware availability Break the gating dependencies between layers in the software stack to enable parallelized... » read more

Tech Talk: FPGA Prototyping


Neil Songcuan, senior product marketing manager at Synopsys, examines the hidden time savings from using an FPGA prototype platform for IP validation and software development, in addition to hardware design. While FPGA prototypes are a well known way of speeding up hardware design, their value in IP validation and software development for an integrated SoC is just beginning to surface. [you... » read more

Powerful Software Optimization


It is commonly accepted that the higher you go in the design chain, the bigger the impact that design and implementation decision can have. While power optimization may have started deep in the silicon, the success of a product, such a smart phone, often is based on the time between charges. Batteries provide a finite energy resource, and while low-level optimization may focus on power reductio... » read more

Rethinking Old Sayings


One of my favorite quotes from Gary Smith is a few years old: “It’s the software, stupid!” That statement was made way back in 2006. While it was, and in some ways still is, very illustrative, I believe it also points to one extreme in the back and forth between focusing on hardware then software to differentiate our electronic systems. At the point in time Gary made the statement that... » read more

Where Dragons Roam


For more than half a year now, I am living with two dragons at home. Luckily from the outside they look just like regular children, so we didn’t have to upgrade our house. But we have to remind our little dragons to switch to human languages when they talk to us. It is interesting, and also a bit sad, to realize that as we “grow up,” we lose the ability to let our imagination go wild a... » read more

Experts At The Table: The Future Of Verification


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the future of verification with Janick Bergeron, Synopsys fellow; Harry Foster, chief verification scientist at Mentor Graphics; Frank Schirrmeister, group director of product marketing for the Cadence System Development Suite; Prakash Narain, president and CEO of Real Intent; and Yunshan Zhu, vice president of new technologies at Atrenta. What foll... » read more

Experts At The Table: The Future Of Verification


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the future of verification with Janick Bergeron, Synopsys fellow; Harry Foster, chief verification scientist at Mentor Graphics; Frank Schirrmeister, group director of product marketing for the Cadence System Development Suite; Prakash Narain, president and CEO of Real Intent; and Yunshan Zhu, vice president of new technologies at Atrenta. What foll... » read more

Lessons From Healthcare.gov


Patterning equipment uses software and needs software security. With that rather weak segue, I would like to discuss software projects, considering they are in the news at the moment. The stories about the healthcare.gov rollout bring back fond memories for all of us of software projects that have gone horribly wrong. On the list of things that guarantee a project will miss deadlines, late c... » read more

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