DVCon: Hardware/software Co-design from a Software Perspective

The EDAC Emerging Companies Comittee (would that be the EDACECC?) is organizing a free panel session one evening at DVCon. It is Monday February 27th from 6pm to 8.30pm. I don’t yet have a room but it will be at the DoubleTree Hotel where DVCon is being held.

EDA companies often address hardware/software co-design from a hardware point of view as if the software somehow is going to be put together once the chip is available, and is a relatively small part of the design of the system (real men design chips). But, in fact, software is often much longer lasting than any individual chips. Much of the software in your phone may be a decade old and running on the fifth or sixth iteration of the hardware. Apple’s iOS alone ran first on a Samsung chip, and then Apple’s own A4 and A5 chips, for example. The result is that hardware and software teams look at the importance of software and software development methodology very differently.

Michel Genard of Wind River was going to moderate it, but Wind moved their sales kickoff and so I’ve been drafted in. I was VP marketing at both VaST Systems Technology and at Virtutech, both of which were heavily involved in the space (VaST is now part of Synopsys, Virtutech now part of Wind River, in turn owned by Intel).

The panellists are:

• Atul Kwatra, principal engineer, Intel Corporation (Intel own Wind River and Virtutech)
• Michael James, senior staff engineer, Lockheed-Martin Space Systems Company (Michael used to work with me at Virtutech)
• Don Williams, head of core technology, Skype (and previously headed up a software development team at Cisco)
• Bill Neifert, chief technology officer, Carbon Design Systems (a virtual platform and modeling company)

Grab a beer and come along. I hope to see you there. The panel is free. You don’t need to be registered for DVCon, nor an EDAC member.

To register for the EDAC panel, go here
To register for DVCon, go here
For more information about the panel, go here