Next week it is the Paris Air Show, the biggest trade show in aerospace and defense. Cadence will be attending for the first time.

The show is held at Le Bourget Airport, which you've probably never heard of. Although it was Paris's first airport, opened in 1919, it has been closed to commercial aviation since 1980. You need a private jet these days. Paris has two commercial airports now. In the North, Charles de Gaulle (although any Parisian will consider you a hick if you call it that, they call it Roissy, which is the town nearby), and Orly in the South near where most of the companies in the electronics business, like Cadence, are located.

Le Bourget is also famous for being where Charles Lindbergh landed The Spirit of St Louis after making the first non-stop flight from New York to Paris across the Atlantic. Today, that flight takes about seven hours. It took him almost five times as long. I doubt he even got chicken or pasta.

I said it was the biggest aerospace and defense show. Last year 142,000 people attended (plus 180,000 of the general public who are allowed to attend on the last day). To put that in perspective, CES Las Vegas has 180,000 attendees, and MWC Barcelona has 110,000, so it's between those two.

The US military (and, I think, military procurement in general) has been surpassed by what goes on in the commercial world as far as electronics are concerned. James Chew, Cadence's military and aerospace director, told me of a meeting he recently had with the advanced technology group of one company. The Cadence team gave their presentations, and everyone was very complimentary, but as they were all leaving the VP of the group said:

But everyone knows that to design an ASIC, you have to start with an FPGA.

In the commercial world, FPGA prototyping is used, but I don't know of anybody who ships an FPGA-based version of the product and then later upgrades it with an ASIC implementation of the same functionality.

Cadence has been increasingly engaged with aerospace and defense, with the focus on using our portfolio of products to produce "better, faster, cheaper" products. Some of our initial engagements were with R&D organizations, but increasingly we are showing successes in real products, what in DoD-speak is called acquisition and sustainment. Even though the DoD was heavily involved in early semiconductor research and subsequently with things like the VHSIC program in the 1980s, modern design in both hardware and software seems to have passed them by. For the software side of the equation, see my post GOMAC: Software Is Never Done.

One thing that has changed is that the defense market has reached a crossover point where the electronic content can't be done efficiently the old way. The breaking point was JSF (joint strike fighter). It takes 8M lines of code and 17 years to develop at twice the planned cost. For comparison, the F-150 pickup truck has 150M lines of code. Automotive manufacturers have had to make a similar transition.

At the Paris Air Show, we will be showcasing what we've been doing. Another message along with "better, faster, cheaper" is "emulate before you fabricate". We will have demos of the Cadence Palladium Z1 emulation system and Protium X1 prototyping system. One challenge that military and aerospace have is that some programs are very long. Only now is the Boeing 747 being phased out completely from many airlines. The B-52 was introduced in the 1950s and is still flying and is expected to be flying into the 2050s. The result is that the electronics and the software needs to be upgraded over the lifetime of the platform. One misnomer is that between hardware and software. As program manager Linton Salmon said in a keynote I attended (see my post Open-Source IP in Government Electronics), "the reality is that it is a lot harder to change software than hardware…we should swap the names". But if you are redesigning the hardware to run the same certified software, you need a way to do this before committing to manufacture the design. Hence "emulate before you fabricate".

The change is in moving from block upgrade to designing systems to be continuously upgradable. This is formalized in the Evolutionary Acquisitions procurement approach:

In order for operational capability to be delivered in a timely manner, capabilities had to be developed that allowed for easy upgrades when desired technology matured. Lessons learned proved it was too cost-prohibitive to upgrade systems that were never meant to be upgraded. This approach became essential with the increased reliance on technology.

The Paris Air Show is international, not especially focused on Europe. Senior people from the US government attend. For example, I have been told that Ms. Ellen Lord will be there, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, as will Dr Will Roper, the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics.

Video

Watch the promotional video for the show (23 seconds with some cool pictures of planes):

More Information

Read the white papers Meeting the Challenges of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, and A Program Manager’s Guide to Successful Integrated Circuit Verification.

I will be attending the show for a couple of days, so look for some coverage here in the next couple of weeks. For details, see the show website (also in French).

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