It is increasingly apparent that Kurzweil’s Singularity is sure getting near, if it is not here already 32 years too soon. Not a week goes by without missing or needing to attend a key conference, seminar, symposium, summit, with each having parallel streams, panels, exhibits, demos, social networking. Not only are we informed,… Read More





Analog IC Verification – A Different Approach
Analog design seems to suffer from a huge gap when it comes to testing and verification. While some of this gap is natural – after all, often the only way to verify whether a particular design is working is to look at actual simulation waveforms – it still seems like a lot can be done to bring process into this sphere of the… Read More
Solido CEO on 20nm/16nm TSMC and GLOBALFOUNDRIES Design Challenges
EDA needs more CEOs like Amit Gupta. Solido, which is now profitable, is his second AMS EDA company. The first, Analog Design Automation (ADA), was purchased by Synopsys for a hefty multiplier. Prior to becoming an EDA entrepreneur, Amit was product manager for the wireless group at Nortel and a hardware engineer for the RF communications… Read More
Costello and Hogan Rock the House at Cadence EDAC ECC Event
No one who spent much time at Cadence during Joe Costello‘s reign as CEO (1987-1997, including SDA) could likely give an unbiased review of last night’s event, EDAC – Jim Hogan Emerging Companies Series. The event was held at Cadence’s 5-story Building 10, a building that had not yet been built while Joe… Read More
Multi-level abstraction accelerates verification turnaround
Often a question is raised about how SystemC improves verification time when the design has to go through RTL in any case. A simple answer is that with SystemC, designs can be described at a higher level of abstraction and then automatically synthesized to RTL. When the hands-on design and verification activity is at a higher level,… Read More
Kathryn Kranen Joins CriticalBlue’s Board
Jasper just announced that Kathryn Kranen, their CEO, had joined the board of CriticalBlue. I used it as an excuse to hit up CriticalBlue’s CEO Dave Stewart, who happened to be in the valley, for a free lunch to catch up on what they are doing.
CriticalBlue started about 10 years ago in Edinburgh (yay!). When it started it was in the business… Read More
An AMS Seminar on May 16th
Analog and Mixed-Signal (AMS) designers are facing more challenges than ever, so where can they go to get some relief? One place is a half-day seminar scheduled for May 16th in Bridgewater, New Jersey. SemiWiki has teamed up with Tanner EDA, Abbot Labs and SoftMEMS to present topics of:
- True collaborative design enabled through
CDNS V. BDA: Motion to Dismiss
The Cadence-BDA saga continues with Berkeley Design Automation today filing a motion to dismiss. You can read the full motion HERE. My previous blog “Cadence Sues Berkeley Design Automation” with 30+ comments is HERE.
The first problem BDA brings up is that the DMCA claim by Cadence is so vague that it doesn’t… Read More
Costello on Story Telling
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 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
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot