Oasys blog

As if I don’t do enough blogging over here, I’m starting a new blog over here for Oasys. They are announcing both the company and their product, Oasys RealTime Designer, today and of course will be showing it at DAC. RealTime Designer is the first product in a new category, chip synthesis. It is 40-100 times faster than conventional synthesis with enormous capacity. This doesn’t just change things a little. In the same way as an airplane is not just a faster bicycle, it changes the way we think about distance, RealTime Designer is not just a faster synthesis tool, it changes the way we think about design methodology.

Why am I doing another blog over there? Why don’t I just do it over here? Firstly, I’m being paid by Oasys to blog about stuff around their product, how their customers adopt it, how people design at the chip level and how the new space develops. That’s not specifically the focus of EDAgraffiti and I’d rather keep the two blogs separate. Over here I write about what ever I feel like writing about and give my unvarnished opinion or advice. I don’t have to worry about biting the hand that feeds me since over here I’m not being paid.

Having said that I do genuinely think that it is interesting to watch adoption of disruptive technology. Obviously I wasn’t blogging then (even the word didn’t exist), but watching the adoption of both place and route in the 1980s, and synthesis in the 1990s were both fascinating. The soul-searching that went with merging these technologies in this decade has also been interesting. It is not that long ago that the notion that the netlist that went into a place and route tool might actually get changed was unthinkable. The implications of power are another area in transition that is interesting to follow.

So go over there and take a look.

Normal service will be resumed over here tomorrow.