Aart: Technomic Push-Pull

Aart: Technomic Push-Pull
by Paul McLellan on 06-26-2013 at 11:00 pm

Aart de Geus gave one of the visionary look to the next 50 years of EDA as a warmup to Stephen Wu’s keynote. EDA is enabling the greatest push-pull ever, part of an exponential change on a scale never before seen.

Technologies seem to go through a 50 year technical push phase (driven by improving the technology) followed by a 50… Read More


Pat Pistilli: the first cell library, the first computer-printed label and more

Pat Pistilli: the first cell library, the first computer-printed label and more
by Paul McLellan on 06-22-2013 at 1:45 pm

At the DAC 50th anniversary banquet, Pat Pistilli won the award for most tenacious attendee, having been to all 50 DACs. Well, and for creating DAC and sustaining it. He was general chair for the first DAC (not yet called DAC) and, of course, would eventually form MP Associates with his wife Marie, which still runs DAC today. In 2010… Read More


DAC by the Numbers

DAC by the Numbers
by Paul McLellan on 06-20-2013 at 12:03 pm

The attendance numbers for DAC are out. Unless you have been living under a stone you know that DAC was in Austin Texas a couple of weeks ago. Attendance was:

  • full conference passes: 1589
  • exhibits-only passes: 2364
  • booth staff: 1998

The registration is slightly lower than last year when DAC was in San Francisco (as it will be again … Read More


Hardware Assisted Verification

Hardware Assisted Verification
by Paul McLellan on 06-10-2013 at 9:00 pm

On the Tuesday of DAC I moderated a panel session on Hardware Assisted Verification in 10 Years: More Need, More Speed. Although this topic obviously could include FPGA-based prototyping, in fact we spent pretty much the whole time talking about emulation. Gary Smith, on Sunday night, actually set up things by pointing out that… Read More


DAC IP Workshop: Are You Ready For Quality Control?

DAC IP Workshop: Are You Ready For Quality Control?
by Paul McLellan on 06-07-2013 at 3:08 am

On Sunday I attended an IP workshop which was presented by TSMC, Atrenta, Sonics and IPextreme. It turns out that the leitmotiv of the afternoon was SpyGlass.

Dan Kochpatcharin of TSMC was first up and gave a little bit of history of the company. They built up their capacity over the years, as I’ve written about before, and last… Read More


ARM: AMBA 5, Cortex-A12, Mali, video, POP…

ARM: AMBA 5, Cortex-A12, Mali, video, POP…
by Paul McLellan on 06-06-2013 at 4:39 pm

ARM announced several new products at DAC in a number of different spaces. In addition I got invited to a briefing with Simon Segars, 30 days from when he takes over as CEO of ARM. I asked Simon if he expected to make any major changes and he basically said ‘no’. ARM’s basic strategy in both mobile and now enterprise… Read More


DAC: Tempus Lunch

DAC: Tempus Lunch
by Paul McLellan on 06-06-2013 at 4:03 pm

I had time for lunch on Monday. That is to say, there was a Cadence panel session about Has Timing Signoff Innovation has become and Oxymoron? What Happened and How Do We Fix It?

The moderator was Brian Fuller, lately of EE Times but now Editor-in-Chief at Cadence (I’m not sure quite what it means either). On the panel were Dipesh… Read More


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