My Candid Conversation with Karen Bartleson

My Candid Conversation with Karen Bartleson
by Pawan Fangaria on 08-16-2015 at 7:30 am

If you don’t know about Karen Bartleson, before I get into details, let me tell you that she was the President of IEEE-SA for the past 2 years and has been nominated by the IEEE Board of Directors as one of the candidates for IEEE President-Elect for 2016. The IEEE is an organization I admire as it plays a key role in advancing technology… Read More


Design For Safety in Automotive Electronics

Design For Safety in Automotive Electronics
by Daniel Payne on 08-11-2015 at 12:00 pm

Do you remember how auto maker Toyota had to pay a $1.2 billion settlement in 2014 because some of their automotive models experienced sudden, unintended acceleration? That scenario has to be an engineer’s worst nightmare because something was missed during the design and testing of an automotive electronics system that… Read More


What Does Legal Sea Foods Have to Do With EDA?

What Does Legal Sea Foods Have to Do With EDA?
by Paul McLellan on 08-11-2015 at 7:00 am

When I drive down to Silicon Valley I usually listen to podcasts rather than just listen to the radio. One that I especially like is Russ Robert’s EconTalk, which has an hour-long episode every Monday morning on a wide range of different aspects of Economics. Normally he interviews an economist. He has also interviewed the… Read More


More FPGA-based prototype myths quashed

More FPGA-based prototype myths quashed
by Don Dingee on 08-03-2015 at 12:00 pm

Speaking of having the right tools, FPGA-based prototyping has become as much if not more about the synthesis software than it is about the FPGA hardware. This is a follow-up to my post earlier this month on FPGA-based prototyping, but with a different perspective from another vendor. Instead of thinking about what else can be done… Read More


John Koeter: How To Be #1 in Interface IP

John Koeter: How To Be #1 in Interface IP
by Paul McLellan on 08-03-2015 at 7:00 am

John Koeter is in charge of marketing Synopsys’ IP and prototyping solutions. I talked to him last week.

He grew up in upstate New York, son of a Scottish mother and a Dutch father who immigrated to the US, so he is first generation American, unlike everyone else I’ve interviewed so far for this series who were born overseas.… Read More


Build Low Power IoT Design with Foundation IP at 40nm

Build Low Power IoT Design with Foundation IP at 40nm
by Pawan Fangaria on 07-28-2015 at 12:00 pm

In a power hungry world of semiconductor devices, multiple ways are being devised to budget power from system to transistor level. The success of IoT (Internet of Things) Edge devices specifically depend on lowest power, lowest area, optimal performance, and lowest cost. These devices need to be highly energy efficient for sustained… Read More


Synopsys’ Andreas Kuehlmann on Software Development

Synopsys’ Andreas Kuehlmann on Software Development
by Paul McLellan on 07-27-2015 at 7:00 am

Andreas Kuehlmann is the general manager of what is officially now known as the Software Integrity Group of Synopsys, what you might think of as Coverity although they have made some acquisitions too, so they now have a broader technology base. I sat down to talk to him last week.

He was brought up in Germany and came to the US in 1991 … Read More


Synopsys Buys Bluetooth IP

Synopsys Buys Bluetooth IP
by Paul McLellan on 07-22-2015 at 7:00 am

There is obviously a broad spectrum of semiconductor IP but broadly speaking it seems to fall into three buckets:

  • foundation IP: standard cells, memories
  • microprocessors and associated peripherals
  • interface IP

Foundation IP is where it all started. When I was at Compass Design Automation in the 1990s that was pretty much what… Read More


Antun Domic, on Synopsys’ Secret Sauce in Design

Antun Domic, on Synopsys’ Secret Sauce in Design
by Paul McLellan on 07-20-2015 at 7:00 am

Antun Domic is the GM of the Design Group at Synopsys. I sat down with him a couple of weeks ago.

His name is Croatian although, of course, there was no Croatia back then it was part of Yugoslavia. But in fact he grew up in Chile and went to university there where he studied EE and math. He came to the US as a grad student and did a PhD at MIT in … Read More


How ARM Implemented a Mali GPU using Logic Synthesis and Place/Route Tools

How ARM Implemented a Mali GPU using Logic Synthesis and Place/Route Tools
by Daniel Payne on 07-17-2015 at 12:00 pm

ARM is a well-known semiconductor IP provider and they often create a reference design so that SoC companies can have a starting point to work with. On the GPU side of IP the ARM engineers have an architecture called Mali, and a recent webinar hosted by Synopsys reviewed how the physical design area was minimized by using a combination… Read More