The Design Automation Conference (DAC), now in its 55[SUP]th[/SUP] year, always offers a lively mix of activities. For EDA vendors and their customers, the focus is on the exhibit floor and in booth suites where the latest technology is on display. For R&D engineers and academics, the technical sessions dig deeply into an … Read More
Author: Randy Smith
HOT Party for a Cause at DAC 55
A Shot in the ARM for IoT
I recently attended the IoT Developers Conference in Santa Clara, CA. There were clearly two major themes in the talks – security and low power. The volume market in IoT is in the edge node devices. These devices have two important characteristics. They acquire data which needs to be transmitted and they typically are battery-driven… Read More
Where are the Entrepreneurs?
This week I attended the UpWest Labs event in San Francisco. UpWest Labs provides seed funding and incubation for a wide range of domains including Enterprise Software, Internet of Things, Infrastructure Technologies, Artificial Intelligence, Consumer Applications, Drones, Cyber Security, Augmented Reality / Virtual … Read More
Product Marketing & the Butterfly Effect
I often feel that product marketing can simultaneously be an underrated and overrated function. More often than not, it suggests product goals, pricing, and positioning. Then the marketing department must defend those positions to both engineering and sales. However, both the engineering and sales departments can claim expertise… Read More
Cadence’s Mixed-Signal Technology Summit
On October 10, I attended another Cadence Summit, this one titled the Cadence Mixed-Signal Technology Summit. Recently, I had written about the Cadence Silicon Verification Summit. The verification event was the first of its kind, and I thought it had terrific content. Being more of a digital guy myself, I was unaware that Cadence… Read More
Cadence’s System-to-Silicon Verification Summit
At this year’s DAC, I spoke with several friends at Cadence. I got the distinct impression that something at Cadence had changed. There was a sense of pride and accomplishment that it seems to me had drifted away over the years. Now employees were speaking with true conviction about the accomplishments of the product development… Read More
What Does Sports and NoC Have in Common?
As an Oakland Raider season ticket holder I attend as many Raider home games as possible. If you have ever attended a live sporting event at a large stadium, and you travelled by car, you are probably familiar with the traffic problems that occur at the end of the game when everyone wants to leave the stadium parking lot at the same time.… Read More
Security Needs in On-Chip Networks
I remember during my first ten years as a software developer, I used many different computers such as IBM mainframes, Apollo and Sun workstations, and VAX computers. During that time I also bought my first home computer, a Macintosh. I didn’t of course think of this at the time, but the one thing they all had in common was that they did… Read More
Challenges of Low Power Network-on-Chip Designs
Everyone understands that as we increasingly focus on the design of mobile devices, there is an increasing focus on low power. But, what is implied in designing for low-power? Designing for low power means we have to work with multiple power domains and multiple clock domains—making our design task more complex. We also must get… Read More
Configurable System IP from a Tool Provider
While I have previously blogged on Forte’s Cynthesizer Workbench’s Interface Generator, I want to take another look from a different perspective. Watching the tool and IP together in action through public videos provided by Forte it struck me as odd what I did not consider earlier, on what should have been obvious to me – Forte is… Read More
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