The Cadence website looks different, doesn't it? We are obviously in the middle of a re-branding.

This re-branding is driven by two things. One is just that it is good to refresh the look of the company from time to time so that it doesn't get dated. But it is also a signal of change. At the 50,000 feet level, what Cadence is doing is extending its expertise in computational software from the IC and PCB domains out into neighboring segments such as electronic systems and embedded software. I recently wrote a series of blog posts that covered this in greater detail:

• Computation and the Data Explosion
• Computational Hardware
• Computational Software

It's not just the website. Here's the booth at the recent embedded world in Nuremberg, Germany. This was a sort of off-Broadway soft opening of the new branding.

Intelligent System Design

I've written quite a bit about Intelligent System Design. For more details, see my posts:

• Intelligent Systems
• Intelligent Systems Design

As you can see from the above diagram, the three pillars of Intelligent System Design are:

• Design Excellence
• System Innovation
• Pervasive Intelligence

To make this a little clearer, design excellence is the traditional Cadence suite of tools for integrated circuit design, our portfolio of optimized standards-based design IP, and our range of Tensilica processors for everything from audio at the low end up to deep learning inference at the high end (with vision, modems, and radar in between).

From that base, Cadence has extended its technology into the system space with new products, such as the Clarity 3D Solver and Celsius Thermal Solver, along with partnerships with Green Hill Software, MathWorks, TensorFlow, and more. We have also recently made a couple of acquisitions in the RF segment of the system space, acquiring AWR from National Instruments and acquiring Integrand Software.

Pervasive Intelligence builds on our knowledge of deep learning to do two things: add artificial intelligence to our design tools and flows, and also to provide specialized IP and services to enable our customers to design chips incorporating deep learning, especially inference at the edge.

I'll be the first to admit that the boundaries between these three circles are a little bit fuzzy. System in package, and advanced package design in general, straddles Design Excellence and System Innovation. Tensilica processors for deep learning inference straddle System Innovation and Pervasive Intelligence. The Palladium Z1 and Protium X1 platforms, for emulation and FPGA prototyping respectively, cross the line from Design Excellence into System Innovation. If you know our product line well, I'm sure you can think of others.

Video

Watch this short (2' 50") video in which Narendra Konda, Director, Hardware Engineering, NVIDIA, talks about the challenges faced while designing the world’s largest GPUs and SoC chips. You can also find this video on the homepage of the Cadence website.

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