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.
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
Comments (6)Canon 5D Mk II dSLR firmware update bug illustrates interconnected firmware problems
Canon recently released a firmware update for its 5D Mk II full-frame dSLR that added 24-fps video abilities to the camera. This was a highly desired feature due to the “film-like” qualities of 24 fps versus 25, 30, 50, or 60 fps used by most video systems. Film aficionados can see the difference in video shot at 24 fps although I usually can’t. In any case, the 5D Mk II dSLR ...... Read More
Comments (1)How to kill a Fluke Multimeter (Not)
I’ve never seen anyone go to the lengths that Australian engineer Dave Jones attempts to kill an electronic product. He tortures a Fluke 28-II DMM by taking it on a canyon dive, throwing it out of a car window, and dropping it from an ever increasing height, culminating in the typical melodrama location: tossing it off a dam. For your amusement: By the way you i ...... Read More
Comments (6)OCZ’s 32Gbyte Onyx SSD breaks $100 barrier
It was only a matter of time. Nobody doubts that solid-state disks (SSDs) will decline in price over time. The only questions are “How fast will prices fall?” and “How much storage will I get for my money?" PC component vendor OCZ contributed some answers to those questions yesterday by introducing a new low-cost “sub 100 dollar,” 32Gbyte, 2.5-inch, SATA II SSD d ...... Read More
Comments (0)Microsoft Puts a Bullet in my Laptop
This morning at 3 am, Microsoft put a bullet into my newly purchased used laptop in the form of a Windows 7 update. A month ago, I purchased a used Lenovo T61 laptop from a local attorney who had put Windows 7 Ultimate on the PC. He’d told me at the time of the purchase that he’d bought and installed a copy of the new OS on top of the Windows XP that Lenovo originally placed on the T ...... Read More
Comments (23)How to Start Your Very Own EDA Company (Don’t run out of cash)
You’d need to search pretty hard to find two people more qualified than Jim Hogan and Paul McLellan to advise you on starting an EDA company. Hogan learned the ropes at Cadence under EDA entrepreneurial legend and demi-god Joe Costello and he then went on to sell Artisan to ARM. Hogan’s done some smaller EDA and non-EDA deals as well. McLellan’s list of EDA startups includes C ...... Read More
Comments (7)Ten Things You Want to be Sure to put into Your SOC
I’ve just spent the day at DVcon in San Jose and met a friend of mine, Gary Stringham, who consults on SOC and embedded systems design. He spent years designing laser printers around SOCs at HP and he’s learned a thing or two about the trials and tribulations of SOC design. Gary’s just published a book, Hardware/Firmware Interface Design: Best Practices for Improving Embedded ...... Read More
Comments (5)The Throttled World of Chip Design
I attended the EDA Consortium’s Annual CEO Forecast and Industry Vision shindig held at the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose last Thursday night. The CEOs on the panel included Mentor’s Wally Rhines –entertaining as always; Synopsys’ Aart de Geus—cool and scholarly as always; Lip-Bu Tan—Cadence’s relatively new CEO; and John Kibarian—founder and ...... Read More
Comments (3)Goodnight Mrs. Loran, Wherever You Are
The US Coast Guard is shutting down most of the Loran-C (Long Range Navigation) base stations today (Monday). They are victims of the current federal fiscal crisis, the economy, and technological progress. GPS has made Loran so superfluous that there are few users of the decades-old system left. Where GPS is global, Loran is local and isn’t usable inland. It’s mostly a coastal naviga ...... Read More
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