Thanks for a Great 2008!

Even though 2008 will probably go down in history as the year of Doom and Gloom we can find a Ray of Hope here and there. 2008 was a good year for ISX. We entered the year with just a handful of companies using the technology and we will exit with many successful projects completed and new projects starting all the time. The launch of the new cadence.com is also a Ray of Hope. It has been a great experience for me to post my ideas and create communication with all of you, the readers. Topics like embedded software verification, debugging, and virtualization are somewhat off the wide road of HDL simulation and hardware verification, but these areas are the future in the world of electronics and vital to the continued success of EDA. I was really amazed at all the feedback I received on so many of the articles I posted. It came from many places; customers, partners, competitors, recruiters, you name it. This contact makes people that I don't really know seem like familiar friends. For example, one of my posts has a comment from somebody I never met, Lisa Simone, and it turns out Lisa wrote a book If I Only Changed the Software, Why is the Phone on Fire?: Embedded Debugging Methods Revealed: Technical Mysteries for Engineers that looks really interesting. This book is published by the same publisher that did my book. It's been great to see these kind of unexpected connections materialize that would have never happened otherwise.

Blogging makes it so much easier to get information to the people who are interested. In the pre-blogging days I would write "white papers" and articles, send them to marketing people, and wait for review or approval. Marketing people would shop the articles around with publications or publish them on he company website. This is a very heavy process that sometimes took months. Having the ability to get information out much quicker is a great improvement and I'm thankful that Cadence has realized this and provided a way to do it.

I don't have any predictions for 2009, but you can be sure that every SoC will include more processors and more software and making all that software behave with all that hardware is not going to get any easier.

Have a great holiday season and see you next year,

Jason