Carbonize your Imagination

Carbonize your Imagination
by Paul McLellan on 06-13-2012 at 7:00 am

Just up the road from Cambridge-based ARM in Kings Langley is Imagination Technologies, their biggest competitor in the GPU market. Interestingly they also were a customer of VLSI Technology in the early days back when they were called Videologic. Tomorrow, jointly with Carbon, they are announcing that a wide range of their PowerVR,… Read More


How to Use Those Licenses Effectively

How to Use Those Licenses Effectively
by Paul McLellan on 06-12-2012 at 8:05 pm

So DAC is over and you are no longer thinking about the features and benefits of new tools or even the tools that you already own. But once you have lots of tools then you need to worry about how to use them efficiently.

But here are three things that you need to worry about to get the most out of your EDA investment:

  • how do you measure the actual
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Jasper’s Kathryn Kranen Elected EDAC Chairman

Jasper’s Kathryn Kranen Elected EDAC Chairman
by Paul McLellan on 06-12-2012 at 8:05 pm


Kathryn Kranen, CEO of Jasper was elected chairman of EDAC for 2012-2014. She has has 20 years EDA industry. She started her career as a design engineer at Rockwell International and then joined Daisy Systems (one of the DMV, the second generation of EDA companies). She then moved to be VP of North American sales at Quickturn (emulation)… Read More


Ausdia’s Timevision

Ausdia’s Timevision
by Paul McLellan on 06-11-2012 at 8:05 pm

I met Sam Appleton of Ausdia during DAC. I found it quite hard to understand exactly what they do. I’ve talked before about something that I nick-named City Slickers’ Marketing. It is named after the following exchange from the movie City Slickers:Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is? [holds up one finger] This.Read More


Cadence/TSMC 3D

Cadence/TSMC 3D
by Paul McLellan on 06-11-2012 at 5:16 pm

Mark Twain remarked that everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it. 3D ICs seems to be a bit like that. Over the last couple of years there have been lots of people talking about 3D but very little that has actually been manufactured. In addition to the weather, everyone talks about Xilinx’s 3D Virtex… Read More


Partitioning Panel

Partitioning Panel
by Paul McLellan on 06-06-2012 at 4:53 pm

I moderated a panel on partitioning today and I have to say that I learned some things. The panelists were Jonathan DeMent from IBM, Santosh Santosh from NVIDIA and Hao Nham of eSilicon. Considering the different types of designs being done their approach to partitioning and the reasons for doing so were very similar.

When you first… Read More


Belle Wei Receives Marie Pistilli Award and is Interviewed

Belle Wei Receives Marie Pistilli Award and is Interviewed
by Paul McLellan on 06-04-2012 at 7:36 pm

Today at DAC Belle Wei received the Marie Pistilli Award, presented to her by Patrick Groeneveld the DAC chair (and flowers from DAC via Chi-Foon Chan, now co-ceo of Synopsys). She was then interviewed by Daya Nadamuni.

Her father was a military general in China and in 1949 in the revolution her family fled to Taiwan where she was born.… Read More


Virtual Platforms plus FPGA Prototyping, the Perfect Mix

Virtual Platforms plus FPGA Prototyping, the Perfect Mix
by Paul McLellan on 06-03-2012 at 8:59 pm

There are two main approaches to building a substructure on which to do software development and architectural analysis before a chip is ready: virtual platforms and FPGA prototyping.

Virtual platforms have the advantage that they are fairly quick to produce and can be created a long time before RTL design for the various blocks… Read More