Leibson's Law
Leibson's Law: It takes 10 years for any disruptive technology to become pervasive in the design community. This blog is about the disruptive technologies that either have or will win over electronic engineers, some that won't, and why. Please feel free to link to these blog entries! Written by Steve Leibson, Technology Evangelist and Director of Strategic Marketing for Denali Software, formerly VP of Content for Reed Business, and formerly Editor in Chief of three publications including EDN and Microprocessor Report. You can email me at steven.leibson followed by the magic email symbol @ followed by att.net.
Questions for the DAC Pavilion Panel on multicore design
As I wrote yesterday, I’ll be chairing a Multicore panel at DAC in Anaheim on Monday in the Panel Pavilion at DAC. This morning, I worked on creating some questions for the panelists with my good friend Markus Levy, President of the Multicore Association, who was the original person scheduled to be the moderator. Here are the questions so far: 1. What comes first with multicore, the hardwar ...... Read More
Comments (0)Don't miss the multicore Pavilion panel discussion at DAC on Monday, June 14
I’ll be moderating the Pavilion panel titled “The Multiplier Effect: Developing Multi-Core, Multi-OS Applications” at DAC on Monday at 10:30 am. It’s no secret that ICs with multiple processor cores are now the norm rather than the exception. Yet there’s a real ad hoc feel to assembling these multicore designs. Is there a better way to develop these complex desig ...... Read More
Comments (0)Once more the Technology Evangelist, at Denali
Last year, I ceased to be a Technology Evangelist and became a marketing consultant. In the ensuing 11 months, I had the rare privilege of working with more than a dozen excellent EOEM clients in a truly wide range of fields: analog ICs, microprocessors, memory IP, EDA, and even first-responder end equipment. All great gigs and I pumped out a lot of great content for these clients. I’ve bee ...... Read More
Comments (3)Robot does what men cannot do: fold towels
UC Berkeley PhD student Jeremy Maitin-Shepard working with Professor Pieter Abbeel led the team that developed robotic code to fold towels, but there’s a catch… The catch is that the video shows the robot folding towels at 50x the actual speed. ...... Read More
Comments (3)Intel Launches Zero-Power Multicore Processor
Today, Intel announced that it has reduced the size of the on-chip transistors on its multicore processors to the point where they no longer draw power. At zero power, processor designers can now insert as many transistors as they want into their designs with no power penalty. What’s more, the transistors are so small that there’s essentially no switching time involved, so the transi ...... Read More
Comments (8)Turing Machine: Built nearly 75 years after conception
More info here. ...... Read More
Comments (1)Live from ISQED: The 70% Solution or “How to reduce verification costs”
EDN’s Ron Wilson has already done a terrific job of covering the third ISQED 2010 keynote speech by Denali CTO and CFO Mark Gogolewski titled “Beyond Endless Verification.” If you want to learn how Denali has drastically reduced verification costs for complex IP block development, be sure to read Ron’s comprehensive description of Gogolewski’s keynote here. Becau ...... Read More
Comments (0)Live from ISQED: The Problems with SOC Design
Mentor’s Shankar Krishnamoorthy is a man who sees nothing but problems ahead for advanced SOC design. As Chief Scientist of Mentor’s Place and Route Division, Krishnamoorthy worries about the huge increase in design rules as design lithographies scale down. He presented his views in a keynote yesterday at ISQED (the International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design). Krishnamoorth ...... Read More
Comments (0)Live from ISQED: Memory is the Future Bottleneck in Multicore Servers
ISQED, the International Symposium for Quality Electronic Design, is currently underway here in San Jose at the Doubletree Hotel. I listened to three keynotes yesterday and will summarize them in three blog entries. The first keynote, by Ramanan Thiagarajah of Inphi Corp discussed the effect that the adoption of multicore CPUs is having on server design. First, we’re getting a lot more CPU ...... Read More
Comments (1)For Sale: Bill Hewlett’s 1987 Chevy Suburban
There was an oddity inside of an oddity in today’s San Jose Mercury News. First, there was a real classified section. The Sunday paper looked bulkier than usual, one of my bellwether signs of economic health here in Silicon Valley. I very, very rarely look at the classified section of the newspaper any more, but I did today. Still not sure why. However, in the auto classifieds, under ȁ ...... Read More
Comments (4)Social Media abuses: Twitter polices, LinkedIn doesn’t
As soon as you toss a product into the social media mix, you can be sure that there will be people attempting to make money from the product by abusing it. Both Twitter and LinkedIn have drawn abusers and it’s interesting to consider the different designs of these systems. In my recent experience, Twitter’s design allows the mob to police itself and rid the group of abusers. LinkedIn ...... Read More
Comments (5)Nothing much changes in computer and processor design
Fred Brooks, who wrote The Mythical Man Month and who worked as an architect on several important IBM computers, recently published an article about the IBM Stretch computer. Not many people know about Stretch (there’s a piece of Stretch in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California). However, the Stretch project in the late 1950s took IBM from vacuum tubes to transistors and ...... Read More
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