http://www.chipdesignmag.com/martins ESL, embedded processors, and more Sun, 10 Aug 2008 01:04:37 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en First, for full disclosure, I would like to mention that I am on the board of Cadstone, a commercial company founded by Perry Alexander to develop Rosetta-based tools and models and offer services. I have also been involved with Rosetta on and off for over a decade, and ... http://www.chipdesignmag.com/martins/2008/08/09/is-rosetta-ready-for-true-system-level-design/ My colleague Patrick Madden, a professor of computer science at Binghamton University in New York, is a great fan of Amdahl's Law, and in fact writes a blog of that name. His main argument is that Amdahl's Law, which limits the speedup possible on an application ported ... http://www.chipdesignmag.com/martins/2008/08/04/inspired-by-amdahls-competition/ The other day I was emailing back and forth with my colleague Steve Leibson about the new Cadence ESL synthesis tool. He commented that there seems to be a gap between IP-centric design (such as processor-centric design, or the use of other large configurable IP blocks) and the general ... http://www.chipdesignmag.com/martins/2008/07/23/space-exploration-design-that-is/ My colleague and friend Steve Leibson writes a blog for EDN, "Leibson's Law", in which he discusses many items relating to his informal law: Leibson's Law: It takes 10 years for any disruptive technology to become pervasive in the design community. In this case, I wonder if Cadence's announcement today (July 14, ... http://www.chipdesignmag.com/martins/2008/07/14/leibsons-law-in-action-cadence-returns-to-esl-with-new-synthesis-tool/ In the "good old days" of business trips, before the internet and cellphones, sometimes a business trip could actually include a large element of travel. That is, in between the meetings there might be time to actually see some interesting historical or cultural sights in the cities and countries ... http://www.chipdesignmag.com/martins/2008/07/07/not-taking-a-country-for-granted/ I'm no Nostradamus, and was of course taken by surprise with the rest of the electronics world when on Monday June 16 I heard that Cadence was going to try to do a hostile takeover of Mentor Graphics. Carlo Antonio Tavella, Jonah and the whale, mid-17th. century Cadence has had a ... http://www.chipdesignmag.com/martins/2008/06/20/merger-mania-what-will-happen-in-esl-if-cadence-swallows-mentor/ I'm starting this blog sitting in one of the near-final technical sessions at DAC, and will continue it no doubt when I get home. To start with, here is an image that will no doubt remind many of DAC: Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Children's Games, 1560 Although DAC covers many aspects of EDA, ... http://www.chipdesignmag.com/martins/2008/06/12/some-highlights-from-dac-2008/ Today's posting is about a new blog written by my friend and colleague Frank Schirrmeister, who now works for Synopsys and has just started his own blog, A View from the Top - A System-Level Blog. And my image is not a classical or modern painting, but one of ... http://www.chipdesignmag.com/martins/2008/05/29/an-original-schirrmeister/ A couple of interesting items from the Multicore Association front. First, they have organised a working group on Multicore Programming Practices, (MPP), to "develop a multicore software programming guide for the industry that will aid in improving consistency and understanding of multicore programming issues." Even more interesting, for non-members, they are ... http://www.chipdesignmag.com/martins/2008/05/24/news-from-the-multicore-front/ One of ESL's great chicken or egg questions is: do ESL modelling tools encourage the development of models to fit, or does model availability encourage the development of and use of ESL modelling tools? Viktor Hartmann, Sketch of costumes for Ballet 'Trilby' (an inspiration for part of Mussorgsky's "Pictures ... http://www.chipdesignmag.com/martins/2008/05/19/which-came-first-the-model-or-the-tool/