EDA Graffiti

EDA GRAFFITI, WITH EDA VETERAN PAUL MCLELLAN, DIGS INTO THE WORLD OF DESIGN TO FIND OUT HOW WE GOT HERE, WHERE WE ARE GOING, AND WHY EDA IS DIFFERENT.

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Sunday, November 15, 2009

NXP, cochlear implants, LED lighting and more

Nov 15 2009 2:09AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (1) |

A couple of weeks ago I spent a morning at NXP’s innovation day. The first slightly surreal aspect of it was that it was in a building I used to work in. After I left VLSI Technology, NXP (then Philips Semiconductors, don’t forget that final “s”) made a successful bid for VLSI and then consolidated their operations in silicon valley into the 4 buildings that VLSI had purchased when its landlord had gone bankrupt. After several rounds of layoffs there are apparently just 250 people working in buildings that I would guess could accommodate 10 times that many people.

Since NXP was spun out of Philips they have divested themselves of their wireless business (sold to ST and now consolidated int...Read More

Friday, November 13, 2009

iPhone is number 1

Nov 13 2009 12:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (4) |

I’ve talked before about just how amazing Apple’s performance in the cell-phone (and laptop) market is. Last quarter, only two years after entering the cell-phone market, Apple became #1, at least if you measure by how much money they made rather than how many phones they shipped.

Apple shipped 7.4 million iPhones for $4.5 billion but they made more profit on them than Nokia made on the 108.5 million phones they shipped for $10.36 billion. Strategy Analytics estimated (since Apple doesn’t tell) that Apple made a profit of $1.6 billion whereas Nokia made only $1.1 billion.

I had a slide from Morgan Stanley at the ICCAD meeting last week that showed that iPhone is the fastest ever adoption of a consumer electronics technology. Actually, that’s not rea...Read More

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Kauffman Award Dinner

Nov 10 2009 12:28PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |

Last week was the EDAC Kauffman Award dinner. One minor advantage of being a blogger is that I got invited along as press. “Will blog for food”. This year’s winner was Professor Randal Bryant, usually just known as Randy Bryant.

I knew of Randy as the inventor of switch level simulation with a tool called MOSSIM. Up until that point, all simulation of semiconductor had been done using Spice type algorithms, worrying about the transfer functions of the transistors. But with the coming of Mead and Conway, computer scientists were starting to want a much simpler model of the world so that they could apply programming techniques to design. Treat transistors as switches that were either on or off and with a unit delay (all transistors turned on and off at the same speed). MOSSIM...Read More

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

ICCAD: EDA for the next 10 years

Nov 3 2009 7:21AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (1) |

Yesterday at ICCAD, Jim Hogan and I led an discussion on the megatrends facing electronics and the implications going forward for EDA. Basically we took a leaf out of Scoop Nisker's book, who when he finished reading the news would sign off with "if you don't like the news go out and make some of your own." So we tried to.

Anyone whose being reading this blog regularly won't be surprised at the position that we took. I managed to find some interesting data from Morgan Stanley about how electronics is growing but it is also fragmenting. PCs ship in 100s of millions; cell-phones in billions (t...Read More

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Hogan and McLellan: live in concert

Oct 29 2009 4:06PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (2) |

Jim Hogan and I are doing a presentation during ICCAD on Monday about what direction we see electronic system design moving, and the implications for EDA. We plan to talk for about 20 minutes and then have a discussion. Come along with your own outspoken opinions on how you think silicon platforms will change, whether we are moving towards software signoff, where the highest value areas are for EDA, and generally what the big high-level drivers are going to be.

It's in the Silicon Valley Room at the Doubletree Hotel (2050 Gateway Place, San Jose). That's up on the second floor by the main staircase. It's at 3pm on this coming Monday, November 2nd.

See you there!

State of the union...of digital and analog

Oct 29 2009 3:59PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (1) |

I spent part of last Tuesday at the Cadence mixed-signal workshop. I went mainly out of interest to see how things had progressed since I worked at Cadence. I had been put in charge of what we called the Superchip project, which was actually integrating together the custom design and the digital synthesis, place & route design to get them into a single design environment. The heart of the problem was to get both systems onto a single database for mixed signal design. This turned out to be immensely complicated since the basic semantics of the two design databases were so different, and nobody in the company had a deep understanding of both of them.

Now, many years later, that work seems to have largely been achieved, but in about 5 times as long as we originally planned.
...Read More

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Looking through Critical Blue's Prism

Oct 28 2009 12:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (1) |

I caught up with Dave Stewart and Skip Hovsmith of CriticalBlue (from Edinburgh, yay, one of my alma maters). They originally developed technology to take software and pull it out of the code and implement it in gates. They had some limited success with this. But now they have refocused their technology on the problem of taking legacy code and helping make it multicore ready with their Prism tool.

They do this by running the code and storing a trace of what goes on for later analysis. Previously they have done this only through simulation but now they can also use hardware boards to run the code. They don’t need a multicore CPU, just one with the same instruction set.

Having developed the trace they can do “what if there were 4 cores, or ...Read More

Monday, October 26, 2009

ARM 20 years on

Oct 26 2009 12:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (1) |

I went to Mike Muller’s keynote at ARM’s techcon3. He started with an interesting retrospective on ARM. They have shipped 15B units (4B in 2008 alone). They have 20+ processor cores, 600+ licensees. In the next 3 or 4 years they will ship another 15B units. It’s not far off to say that “almost all” microprocessors are ARMs (by unit count).

Smartphones are one big driver now. Basic and enhanced phones have peaked and volumes are actually declining, but smartphone is growing fast. For example between 2007 and 2008 mobile phone browsing increased by 30%. It is clear that smartphones are going to become the dominant way of accessing the internet (they already are in Asia).

If you look out the next 10 years then in one aspect things look rosy. In 20...Read More

Friday, October 23, 2009

TJ Rodgers and the PSoC

Oct 23 2009 11:58AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (7) |

I was at the ARM developer conference this week. Actually it has been renamed and is now called Techcon3, which seems pretty generic as branding. Anyway, one of the keynotes was by TJ Rodgers who started off by telling us more than we wanted to know about how he is using software and hardware to try and make the new world’s best pinot noir (he’s conceded that DRC is too hard to beat, but that’s old world). However, there was a serious point: he used Cypress PSoCs (programmable systems on chip) to implement the hardware, which was a use not envisaged when the hardware was designed.

Originally Cypress got into the PSoC business by accident. They decided to take a USB controller they had built (which cost 25c to make and sold for 50c) and use the basic technology to attack th...Read More

Saturday, October 17, 2009

New World Synphony

Oct 17 2009 12:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (2) |

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I was writing about software-signoff and FPGAs. I mentioned that Synopsys didn’t really have any high-level synthesis. Rumor has it that they do have sequential formal verification in development. Anyway, on Monday they announced Synphony which they position as high-level synthesis. Synopsys has musical product names now, not just Cadence.

Unlike other high-level synthesis it doesn’t start from C or C++ or SystemC. It starts from M, which is the language used within Matlab, the system development environment of The Mathworks. A lot of system design, especially in radio and automotive, is done using Mathworks products. They are a private company with a h...Read More

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

NXP/Virage

Oct 14 2009 12:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |

Virage is on a roll right now. Originally a standard cell and memory company, it recently acquired a microprocessor line with ARC and now it has acquired another big increase in its size by taking on a lot of the analog IP from NXP and a large development group in Eindhoven. An off-topic aside: if you ever go to Eindhoven (or the Netherlands in general) make sure to have Indonesian food. It’s wonderful and really flavorful, and the local Dutch food sets a low bar to clear. Rijstafel is the magic word.

Ron Wilson’s take on the acquisition is here.

I have been predicting that once the integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) give up on their fabs that they will turn out t...Read More

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

The Microsoft/T-Mobile fiasco

Oct 13 2009 2:36PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (6) |

I talked a couple of weeks ago about how it is necessary to be brutal and cull the managers of internal products in an acquisition otherwise the management of the joint product roadmap would become completely dysfunctional.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably are aware that Microsoft had a catastrophic failure of their back-end server systems that support T-mobile’s Sidekick phones, losing most user’s data completely without any backup. There are various rumors around about how that happened, the most complete one is here. At root, part of the problem is having two internal groups, one acquired, one with a special conduit to senio...Read More

Thursday, October 8, 2009

That's all folks

Oct 8 2009 12:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (10) |

There was a reason I wrote about biometrics trecently. I have a new job as COO (and VP marketing) at Biogy, which is a biometrics company. Already I’ve become a biometrics bore. But that means I don’t really have time any more to be an EDA bore as well, not to mention that since I’ll be spending less time in the EDA milieu I won’t have anything interesting to say about it any more. Okay, I set myself up for comments about not having anything interesting to say anyway, in which case why are you here reading this? Biogy isn't fully funded so I'm not getting paid yet so I'm still interested in EDA consulting opportunities.

Anyway, time will tell how this all plays out. Maybe the gravitational attraction vortex of EDA will once again prove too much and I’ll be ba...Read More

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Biometrics conference

Oct 7 2009 12:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (3) |

I was at a biometrics conference in Florida the week before last. The state of the art is much more advanced than I realized in many areas.

For example, iris recognition can be done at a distance of a couple of meters. You just look at a screen for a second or two and the system can identify who you are and thus whether you are approved to enter, or whatever. In a self-contained unit, the unit itself can store 100,000 people. With a back-end database there can be millions or even hundreds of millions and identification still takes place in under 2 seconds. This is still what is called cooperative recognition, where the person being identified follows instructions, opens their eyes, takes off their glasses (although it has a pretty good recognition rate even if you d...Read More

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