What started as blogs, or vignettes as Wally calls them, posted on SemiWiki is now a free PDF eBook. The journey starts with his school days at Stanford through 20+ years at TI and 24+ years at Mentor Graphics. Wally has traveled millions of miles meeting with every customer imaginable while presenting hundreds of different keynotes… Read More
There was an interesting keynote at DVCon last month. It was titled “Thriving in the Age of Digitalization” which introduced the concept of digital twins for design and production. It was presented by Fram Akiki who is a relative newcomer to EDA but has an interesting history so I will start there.
Fram and I got started in the semiconductor… Read More
Scanning headlines of technology news every day I was somewhat familiar with the phrase “Generative Design” and even browsed the Wikipedia page to find this informative flow-chart that shows the practice of generative design.
Generative design is an iterative design process that involves a program that will generate… Read More
The rapidly increasing complexity of today’s designs, combined with schedule pressure to deliver innovative products to market as quickly as possible, strains engineering resources to the limit, often to the point of breaking. As a result, 17% of all projects get canceled, and another 28% miss their target release date (Source:… Read More
The “20 Questions with Wally Rhines” series finale
During the period from 1997, I had the privilege to work with Greg Hinckley, a superb “out of the box” thinker and excellent operational manager. We had such a common view of the world that we almost always agreed upon the best approach to problems and opportunities … Read More
I joined Mentor Graphics (now Mentor, A Siemens Business), in late 1993. Tom Engibous, one of my direct reporting people at TI, was promoted to replace me as head of the Semiconductor business of TI and I moved on to what I knew would be a real challenge,… Read More
As you know I am a big fan of disruption and the Siemens acquisition of Mentor is turning out to be one of my favorite EDA disruptions. At first it was a little bit perplexing but after one short year it makes complete sense.
Siemens is acquiring Mentor as part of its Vision 2020 concept to be the Benchmark for the New Industrial Age. It’s… Read More
When traveling the world there are the things that you see and the people that you meet. I have been very fortunate to meet some of the most amazing people and one of those people is Dr. Walden Rhines. Wally spent the first half of his career in semiconductors at TI and the second half in EDA with Mentor Graphics which gives him a cyborg … Read More
Having spent my entire thirty plus year career in semiconductors and design enablement I have seen quite a change in diversity. When I first started I remember thinking that height and weight was the only diversity here in Silicon Valley. My wife really noticed it when she attended her first Design Automation Conference in 1985 … Read More
Publishing eBooks on FPGA Prototyping and Emulation really was an eye opener for me as a long time EDA and IP professional. Both markets are considered EDA in the traditional sense but they are very much in the systems business with a lot of IP. Both markets are also growing very rapidly and operate side-by-side with complimentary… Read More
