CDNLive! Silicon Valley 2010: User Papers Explore Digital Implementation

I previously wrote about the general session of the 2010 CDNLive! Silicon Valley conference, focusing on what EDA360 means for Digital Implementation engineers.  Today I wanted to share a little more about a couple of papers I co-presented along with Cadence customers.  I enjoy co-presenting with customers where I, as a Cadence Applications Engineer, describe a piece of functionality in the system and then a customer describes how they brought it to bear on a real-world design challenge.  It's not always pretty or perfect but it is almost always useful.  The best part of conferences like these is the chance to connect other users with the same hyper-specific interests as you have, and then hopefully stay connected with them via the Cadence.com Community or on other social channels.

Proceedings for the conference have been posted.  Click here to access CDNLive! Silicon Valley 2010 On-Demand where you can access slides for the presentations described below, along with (optionally) listening to audio recordings of the presentations along with slides.  You'll need a Cadence.com account to view the content.  If you don't have one you can get one here.

In the first presentation I was involved with, Ranjit LoboPrabhu from Netronome described how they implemented a post-mask Mega-ECO.  Post-mask meaning all of the base layers were frozen so no changes could be made to the instances in the design, and "mega" meaning a large amount of changes were being made.  ECOs like this are complex because all the changes need to be made using spare cells -- or by reclaiming dormant logic if not enough spare cells are available.  Ranjit (photo below) shared how they leveraged Conformal ECO Designer along with the Encounter Digital Implementation System's "ecoDesign" super-command to achieve their design goals.  Judging from the amount of audience interaction during the session, I think attendees appreciated the level of technical detail in the presentation.  

Next, Jason Gentry from Avago Technologies presented on extending the Encounter Digital Implementation System GUI in version 9.1.  You might remember his name from a guest post he wrote about the dbTransform command.  In the 9.1 release, Encounter switched from having an entirely tk-based GUI to being Qt-based.  That changed the way we as users interact with and extend the main GUI.  If you've tried to source an Encounter script written for version 8.1 or earlier that attaches a new item to a pulldown menu and received a message saying bad window path name ".m" this presentation was right up your alley.  

Thanks to everyone who participated in the conference, especially those who introduced themselves saying they participate in the Cadence.com Digitial Implementation Community.  It means a lot to me.  I'll look forward to continuing the conversation and seeing you at a future Cadence event!

Bob Dwyer