Okay, President Obama didn’t actually stop at DAC but he did do a drive by. I happened to be stepping out for some much needed fresh air and there goes his speeding motorcade. It was quite a sight actually, with all of the motorcycles, SUVs, a SWAT vehicle and even a paramedic rig (my son the Fireman drives one of those). The president … Read More




Partitioning Panel
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
Collaboration at 28nm, 20nm and 14nm
Wednesday morning I attended a panel discussion with: ARM, IBM, Cadence, GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung.
The panelists all sang the same song of collaboration between EDA, IP and Foundry to enable 28nm, 20nm and even 14nm.… Read More
Physical IP Not From ARM or Synopsys
ARM and Synopsys are well-known physical IP companies however at DAC today I met with a lesser-known company named DXCORR that has some unique offerings for cache, multi-port memory and standard cell kicker libraries. I met with:… Read More
Belle Wei Receives Marie Pistilli Award and is Interviewed
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
DAC 2012 – Sunday Night Kick Off
I arrived to a sunny San Francisco this afternoon, checked into my hotel then visited Moscone Center to pick up my Independent Media credentials. On the walk over I passed by Yerba Buena Gardens.… Read More
Virtual Platforms plus FPGA Prototyping, the Perfect Mix
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
Understanding and Designing For Variation in GLOBALFOUNDRIES 28nm
On Wednesday there is a User Track Poster Session that examines the design impact of process variation in GLOBALFOUNDRIES 28nm technology. For those of you who are wondering what process variation looks like at 20nm take this 28nm example and multiply it by one hundred (slight exaggeration, maybe).
Variation effects have a significant… Read More
Industry Standard FinFET versus Intel Tri-Gate!
Ever since the “Intel Reinvents Transistors Using New 3-D Structure” PR campaign I have been at odds with them. As technologists, I have nothing but respect for Intel. The Intel PR department, however, quite frankly, is evil. Correct me if I’m wrong here but Intel did not “reinvent” the transistor. Nor did they come up with the name… Read More
Spyglass by Atrenta
I’ve been helping get booths set up at DAC in Moscone for the last couple of days. Atrenta’s booth shows their new branding that I talked about last week. Now you can see what they are doing in this picture of their booth. As I sort of guessed they are leading with the Spyglass name. The booth says everywhere “Spyglass… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot