EDA Graffiti
EDAgraffiti is now at edagraffiti.com
I’ve moved EDAgraffiti to its own website at www.edagraffiti.com. There may be teething troubles so please let me know of any problems. See you over there… ...... Read More
Comments (1)Magma: getting products into the channel
I met Rajeev Madhavan, CEO of Magma, last week. We talked about a number of things but focused on one issue I’ve talked about before. Large EDA companies are capable of developing new technology—they have plenty of smart engineers, after all—but struggle to introduce new products into their channel. The reason is that their salespeople are rational and realize that they don&#x ...... Read More
Comments (4)Global foundries' plan for world domination
Last week I attended the Global Technology Conference, which sounds like something that the United Nations might sponsor but is, in fact, organized by Global Foundries. Just in case you don’t remember who Global Foundries are, they are the old manufacturing arm of AMD which was spun out (partially, AMD still kept a share) and purchased by ATIC, a financial group based in Abu Dhabi. They sin ...... Read More
Comments (2)Polyteda
One startup I did run across that looks interesting is Polyteda. Let me first point out that this is all based simply on talking to them and I’ve not run their tools or done any other diligence. They have a next generation DRC facing off against Calibre (also they have LVS). They are based out of the Ukraine. When I had a development group in Moscow when I was at Compass one of the things I ...... Read More
Comments (2)DAC retrospective
So what was the theme of DAC this year? Two things stood out for me: one is that the big EDA companies are getting serious about doing design at a higher level. I think we need a new name for this since ESL tends to focus on IC design, whereas the underlying message is that moving to the higher level is about designing electronic systems including their software, not largely about chip design.Ment ...... Read More
Comments (0)Linaro: the latest in the ARM and Atom battle
Usually when two companies initiate a joint venture or work together, it is often casually referred to as the two companies getting in bed together. Last week, a veritable orgy was announced. ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments announced that they are creating a company, Linaro, to provide better distribution and tools for Linux. Reading between the lines, this looks li ...... Read More
Comments (3)Design Automation Conference preview
Unless you have been hibernating through the winter (which some days seems to still be going on) then you know that DAC is coming up on 13th June through Friday if you stay all the way through the tutorials. So what’s new this year? The DAC party has moved from Wednesday to Tuesday, and is now sponsored by Denali. This is not to be confused with the Denali party itself, which is now on Mond ...... Read More
Comments (4)EDAgraffiti, the book
The book of the blog is now available for purchase here. Here’s an extract from the introduction that gives an overview of what the book is: This book is an outgrowth from this blog. Although the basis of the book is the original blog entries there is new material and the old material has been extensively revised. Furthermore, I’ve reordered the content so that each chapter cover ...... Read More
Comments (0)Cadence summits Denali
Cadence announced that they had acquired Denali for $330M today. They reckon that it will be accretive this year. Since the beginning of the year there has been a sort of land grab going on in the system and IP spaces. There are rumors around that at least one of the high-level synthesis companies is about to be acquired too. It is going to be interesting to see just how this all plays out. Ma ...... Read More
Comments (0)Is it time to start using high-level synthesis?
One big question people have about high-level synthesis (HLS) is whether or not it is ready for mainstream use. In other words, does it really work (yet)? HLS has had a long history starting with products like Synopsys’s Behavioral Compiler and Cadence’s Visual Architect which never achieved any serious adoption. Then there was a next generation with companies like Synfora, Forte ...... Read More
Comments (0)Around the Imax with EDA360
Cadence had a big announcement at the Embedded Systems Conference this week. Actually, not at the conference (I don’t think they even have a booth) but in the Imax theater in the Tech Museum (and, on another topic, are they ever going to update any of the exhibits in the Tech Museum?) Yes, Cadence and embedded systems are not things you usually think of together. However, they announced ...... Read More
Comments (0)EmbeDAC
The latest EDAC spring meeting was a bit different from usual. The panel session was all about embedded software. John Bruggeman, now at Cadence but previously at Wind River, lined up his old colleague Tomas Evensen (the CTO of Wind River, now part of Intel), Jim Ready (the CTO of Montavista, now part of Cavium Networks) and Jack Greenbaum (director of embedded software engineering for Green ...... Read More
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