DAC: Wally’s Vision

DAC: Wally’s Vision
by Paul McLellan on 06-06-2013 at 3:07 pm

One new feature at DAC this year is that several of the keynotes are preceded by a ten minute vision of the future from one of the EDA CEOs. Today it was Wally Rhines’s turn. Wally is CEO of Mentor Graphics. He titled his talk Changing the World Through EDA. Since EDA as we know it started in the late 1970s, the number of transistors… Read More


DAC: Gary Smith: Don’t Give Away Your Models

DAC: Gary Smith: Don’t Give Away Your Models
by Paul McLellan on 06-06-2013 at 4:10 am

As is now traditional, Gary Smith kicked off DAC proper (there were workshops earlier and some co-located conferences started days before). He started by dismissing the idea that it costs $170M to do an SoC design.

In fact he looked at 3 different cases. Firstly, the completely unconstrained design. Well, no design is completely… Read More


Kaufman Award: Chenming Hu

Kaufman Award: Chenming Hu
by Paul McLellan on 06-06-2013 at 3:44 am

This year’s Kaufman award winner is Chenming Hu. In contrast to previous years, this was presented on the Sunday evening of DAC instead of at a separate event in San Jose. Chenming’s career was reviewed by Klaus Schuegraf, Group Vice President of EUV Product Development at Cymer, Inc (now part of ASML) and also one of… Read More


ARM @ #50DAC

ARM @ #50DAC
by Daniel Nenni on 05-31-2013 at 10:00 pm

The 2013 Design Automation Conference celebrates its 50th anniversary Sunday, June 2 through Thursday, June 6 at the Austin Convention Center. DAC is the world’s leading technical conference and trade show on electronic design and design automation. DAC is where the IC Design and EDA ecosystem learns, networks, and does… Read More


Cooley’s Cheesy Must See List for DAC is Out

Cooley’s Cheesy Must See List for DAC is Out
by Paul McLellan on 05-31-2013 at 6:23 pm

One of the other increasingly successful channels (besides Semiwiki of course) for EDA, IP and semiconductor companies to reach potential customers is John Cooley’s DeepChip. Every year he puts a lot of effort into trying to find out who is exhibiting what at DAC and which stuff seems like it is new and maybe important, and… Read More


ARM Partners with Carbon on Cortex-A57

ARM Partners with Carbon on Cortex-A57
by Paul McLellan on 05-31-2013 at 3:37 pm

Just in time for DAC, Carbon have announced that they have expanded their partnership with ARM to create and deliver models for the ARM Cortex-A57 processor and related IP. One piece of related IP is the Cortex-A53 which can be configured in big.LITTLE multi-core setups to achieve the sweet spot of higher performance and lower power.… Read More


Atrenta: Mentor/Spyglass Power Signoff…and a Book

Atrenta: Mentor/Spyglass Power Signoff…and a Book
by Paul McLellan on 05-30-2013 at 7:00 am

Today Atrenta and Mentor announced that they were collaborating to enable accurate, signoff quality power estimation at the RTL for entire SoCs. The idea is to facilitate RTL power estimation for designs of over 50M gates running actual software loads over hundreds of millions of cycles, resulting in simulation datasets in the… Read More


The Hot Zone: Do Good While Having Fun

The Hot Zone: Do Good While Having Fun
by Paul McLellan on 05-29-2013 at 12:39 pm


The big 50th Anniversary party for DAC is on Monday night at the home of Austin City Limits. However, you can do good while enjoying yourself and also get into “The Hot Zone”, an exclusive area within the party in the penthouse Jack and Jim Gallery. The Gallery features 30 original photographs from the godfather of music… Read More


RTL Signoff Theater

RTL Signoff Theater
by Paul McLellan on 05-29-2013 at 11:00 am

We have talked for years about RTL signoff, the idea that a design could be finalized at the RTL level and then most of the signoff would take place there. Then the design would be passed to a physical implementation team who would not expect to run into any problems (such as routing congestion, missing the power budget or similar problems).… Read More


Jasper’s DAC Program

Jasper’s DAC Program
by Paul McLellan on 05-28-2013 at 3:52 pm

Jasper’s booth is 2346 where you can see demos of the JasperGold Apps and attend seminars on the experiences of ST and Broadcom, and others:

  • The Broadcom presentation on making formal an integral part of chip design is Tuesday at 10am.
  • The ST presentation on adapting formal methods in ARM subsystems is Monday at 1.30pm and
Read More