For years I have observed a simple confusion between power and energy leading designers to jump to odd conceptions about design alternatives. Power consumption is expressed in units such as milliWatts (mW) consumed over some suitably short interval of time. To quote our modern oracle, Wikipedia, In its technical sense, power is not at all [...]
This week I was invited to speak at an Intel-sponsored symposium at the Technion, Haifa, Israel. The theme of the symposium was “Challenges and Opportunites in System-Level Design and Verification” (see here for an outline of the symposium). I spoke on the theme “Software-Defined Everything: The impact on high-level design and validation”. There were several [...]
I was surprised yesterday morning – Friday August 26 – to read a John Cooley “intercept” indicating that Mentor Graphics had moved its Catapult C group over to Calypto in which they had also bought a major interest. Of course, this was a rumour, albeit grounded in inside information. Later that day the Reality-Based community [...]
I returned from DAC 2011 Thursday evening, after being in San Diego since Saturday evening. Here are some observations: Attendance – I see that DAC has announced double digit attendance rises in all categories. This is something that I am terrible at estimating so I will take their word for it. Anecdotally, I did attend [...]
One of my favourite episodes of Seinfeld is the one with the tag line “It’s a Ziggy”. (The episode is called “The Cartoon“). In it, Elaine draws a cartoon for the New Yorker that gets accepted, but it turns out she has subconsciously copied the joke in the cartoon from the comic strip Ziggy. [...]
I am planning to be at DAC 2011 in San Diego in early June. I have several activities in which I will be participating: The CODES+ISSS 2011 technical programme committee meeting (part of ESWeek 2011 in October in Taiwan); chairing a Pavilion Panel; and giving a talk as part of the Embedded System and Software [...]
The big advantage of wifi and the internet is that when you are away from home base, you can be in constant touch. The big disadvantage of wifi and the internet is that when you are away from home base, you NEED to be in constant touch! Unfortunately, the number of work related things I [...]
Attending DATE 2011 today, listening to talks and panels, asking questions and meeting people and asking them for their views, I have realised that it is increasingly unlikely that the classical EDA industry, dominated by Synopsys – Cadence – Mentor as it is, will provide big advances in embedded software design and creation tools. When [...]
I am about to leave for DATE 2011 in Grenoble, where I will be giving a talk on “The Virtual Design Requirements of Configurable Manycore Baseband Platforms”, part of a Hot Topic session I helped organise with Rainer Leupers on Virtual Manycore Platforms: Moving Towards 100+ Processor Cores. (Wednesday March 16, 1100-1230). I missed DATE [...]
Something I have had a loose association with for a number of years is the Electronic Design Process Symposium, which is being held next year in April (7-8), always at the Monterey Beach Hotel in Monterey, California. I have talked there, given a keynote, been on panels, and served on the programme committee for it. [...]