Costello on Story Telling

Costello on Story Telling
by Paul McLellan on 05-01-2013 at 9:03 pm

Last night at Cadence was the next installment of what I have been calling Hogan University. Jim interviewed Joe Costello about how to tell a story as part of the EDAC emerging companies series of events. The main focus was how to tell a story as a small EDA company communicating with investors, although there are obviously other forms… Read More


DAC: Calypto Insight Presentation

DAC: Calypto Insight Presentation
by Paul McLellan on 05-01-2013 at 5:39 pm

DAC has several “Insight Presentations” on Wednesday June 5th. Bryan Bowyer from Calypto will be presenting from 2-4pm that day (don’t know where, the DAC website doesn’t have a room number specified yet). The topic is Reducing Design and Debug Time with Synthesizable TLM. TLM, of course, stands for… Read More


DAC Keynotes: 5 This Year

DAC Keynotes: 5 This Year
by Paul McLellan on 05-01-2013 at 2:38 pm

DAC is in Austin this year, as I’m sure you know, and DAC has keynotes by CEOs of two Austin-based companies Freescale Semiconductor and National Instrument. Two more keynotes (one split into two) are focused on mobile, which has become the major driver of semiconductor today. A fifth keynote, including presentation of … Read More


Using Virtual Platforms to Make IP Decisions

Using Virtual Platforms to Make IP Decisions
by Paul McLellan on 04-27-2013 at 10:48 am

Most SoC designs these days consist largely, but not entirely, of purchased IP blocks. But there are lots of tradeoffs involved in selecting IP blocks, and since those tradeoffs change with process node, even decisions that seem “obvious” based on the last generation of the design, may not be so clear cut. Even if you… Read More


GSA European Executive Forum

GSA European Executive Forum
by Paul McLellan on 04-27-2013 at 9:58 am

The first week of June is DAC in Austin of course. But over in Europe, the Wednesday and Thursday of that week, June 5-6th is the GSA European Executive Forum, bringing C-level executives together from all over Europe. It actually runs from 2pm on Wednesday until about 2pm on Thursday including a VIP dinner on Wednesday evening sponsored… Read More


Best Practice for RTL Power Design for Mobile

Best Practice for RTL Power Design for Mobile
by Paul McLellan on 04-25-2013 at 11:54 am

Mobile devices are taking over the world. If you want lots of graphs and data then look at Mary Meeker’s presentation that I blogged about earlier this week. The graph on the right is just one datapoint, showing that mobile access to the internet is probably up to about 15% now from a standing start 5 years ago.

Of course, one obvious… Read More


Mary Meeker’s Annual Internet Trends is Out

Mary Meeker’s Annual Internet Trends is Out
by Paul McLellan on 04-23-2013 at 8:05 pm

Every year, analyst Mary Meeker produces a large presentation (88 slides this year) about internet trends. This year’s oneis just out. So much of the semiconductor industry is driven by trends in mobile and PCs. Increasingly, just by mobile since it has already overtaken PCs in terms of units and will soon overtake in terms… Read More


Happy Birthday to Synopsys VIP

Happy Birthday to Synopsys VIP
by Paul McLellan on 04-22-2013 at 3:25 am

I met Mike Sanie around DVCon time and planned to write a blog about the one year anniversary of Synopsys Discovery VIP which was announced during Aart’s keynote at DVCon in 2012. Eric covered it for SemiWiki here. But Synopsys had other stuff they wanted me to blog about and so it is a couple of months late. The 14th month anniversary… Read More


Mentor’s New Embedded Strategy

Mentor’s New Embedded Strategy
by Paul McLellan on 04-22-2013 at 2:01 am

If there is a trend I can detect in verification in 2013, it is taking verification environments and making the user interface, scripts, and tools work uniformly across the whole spectrum of possible verification “substrates” from virtual platforms, FPGA boards, emulation, actual chips, RTL simulation and so … Read More


Andes, ARM, Imagination, MIPS

Andes, ARM, Imagination, MIPS
by Paul McLellan on 04-19-2013 at 12:44 pm

The last session of the day for Linley Mobile was about processors to go into smartphones. One surprise was that there is a core that nobody seems to have heard of since it is only really used in Taiwan up until now, and it is used in several Mediatek chips.

The most “glamorous” processor in a smartphone is the one in the application… Read More