Automation for digital design has been mainstream for a couple of decades but place and route for analog is still in its infancy. Many attempts have been made over the years to automate analog design in one way and another, the bodies are piled up on the hillside. Much analog design is still largely done with custom layout and circuit… Read More
Author: Paul McLellan
DAC 2012…need caffeine?
You are in San Francisco for DAC and you want a coffee. OK, if your booth duty is 5 minutes away you pretty much have to take the Moscone coffee. Tastes good, hot, has caffeine. As Meatloaf used to sing (showing my age here) two out of three ain’t bad.
Yes, there are Starbucks all over the city, one on 4th Street just by Moscone Center,… Read More
EDAC Emerging Companies: Learn How to Emerge
EDAC has a series of seminars for emerging companies with Jim Hogan. Jim has been in EDA since, like, forever. First at National, then at Cadence, then at Artisan (now ARM) and then as an investor first at Telos (Cadence’s VC arm) and more recently on his own at Vista Ventures. He has been involved with many EDA and semiconductor… Read More
Going with the Flow at AMD
At EDPS in Monterey, Tom Spyrou of AMD talked about their compute environment in the context of parallel algorithms. I discovered that they are a big user of RTDA’s FlowTracer so I talked to Philip Steinke at AMD about how they used it.
He said that they largely use it as described in The Art of Flows as a graphical distributed … Read More
Analyzing Cortex Performance
CPAK sounds like something politicians create to collect money, but in fact it is a Carbon Performance Analysis Kit. It consists of models, reference platform, initialization software (for bare metal CPAKs) or OS binary (for Linux and Android based CPAKs). They are (or will soon be) available for ARM Cortex A9, ARM Cortex A15 and… Read More
MIPS, ARM, ARC, Imagination, Ceva
The Linley Group, whose conference on mobile I recently attended, has some interesting data about the processor core market. Firstly, the numbers are big: CPU cores shipped in over 10 billion chips last year which is up 25% on last. ARM has a share of 78% of that entire market. The big surprise to me was the #2 was not MIPS but Synopsys… Read More
DAC: Finding Somewhere to Eat
I am not going to attempt to give you any restaurant advice beyond what I’ve already done by listing the good places near the conference center. San Francisco reputedly has over 3000 restaurants so I don’t know anything about more than a tiny fraction. However, with that many restaurants, most places are pretty good. If not, they … Read More
♫ If you are going to San Francisco, be sure to….
Well, you can wear flowers in your hair if you like, but it is a bit sixties. However, here are some things that I do recommend that you be sure to do.
Some of these recommendations require you to find a given numbered pier. The Ferry Building at the end of Market Street is effectively pier 0. Odd numbers go north (including pier 1½ ). Even… Read More
DAC: Chevy Volt Teardown
One DAC panel session that I am looking forward to attending is the Chevy Volt Teardown. This takes place at 1.30-2.30pm on Tuesday June 5th at the DAC pavilion (aka booth 310). Al Speier will be talking about a teardown that they did at Munro Associates where he is a senior associate. Unfortunately they won’t actually be tearing… Read More
RTDA at DAC: Scale to Millions of Jobs
RTDA is all about enterprise level scalability. Their three main products all scale to be able to handle the most demanding needs of large companies with large farms of servers. Of course there are some new refinements too.
LicenseMonitor can scale to 70,000 simultaneous checkouts with 1 billion checkout records in the database.… Read More
TSMC N3 Process Technology Wiki