Cadence on the Beat Blogs

Girls Who Code (GWC) is on a mission. Recognizing the enormous gender gap in technology, GWC is working to change the image of what a programmer looks like and does—and offers free programs for girls to make those changes. These nation-wide pro...

Like many creative people, Gilles Lamant, Distinguished Engineer at Cadence, has a cluttered office. But like many “crazy scientists” (his words, not mine!), he also knows what every pile contains, whether it is books, papers, Legos, hand...

I just came across this article on Vice Motherboard , and it blew me away. The article was reporting on a paper published in Nature magazine on July 3, 2019 , about unsupervised word embeddings capturing latent knowledge from materials science literatu...

Sultry, sultry, Austin, Texas. This was the site of the IEEE WIE ILC conference held on May 23-24, and I had the privilege of attending both days, along with 1400 other attendees. From the IEEE WIE ILC conference website, the conference is described ...

As you may know, I don’t come from a highly technical background—most of what I know about the semiconductor industry is what I have picked up on the job. But I watched a couple of Whiteboard Wednesdays by Tom Hackett , published in April ...

No, I didn’t attend VerveCon 2019 alone; there were several Cadence employees there. I’ll explain that title in a minute. Yes, the second annual VerveCon , a conference focusing on cultivating women in leadership roles in the tech industry...

Recently, a friend of mine discovered a swarm of bees on his property. He called a local beekeeper, who came to capture the bees and take them to a safe, new hive. While she was working, she talked to us about bees. When a colony becomes too large fo...

GPS is great. I can drive practically anywhere, with directions to get to almost anywhere, and there are apps on my phone that I can use to detect traffic, locate where police officers are hiding out, see potential hazards on the roads—even det...

As I drove my commute this morning, I was almost in an accident. I had slowed down for some backed-up traffic ahead, and I looked in my rearview window—and saw another car barreling down on mine, seemingly with no intent to stop. At the last mi...

One of the things that I love about working at Cadence is that Cadence really takes the gender disparity in technology seriously. Cadence supports our women employees with our Women@Cadence group and supports future technology innovators by partnerin...

Last weekend, I took my son to the Dickens Fair for the second year in a row. As we did last year, we had a marvelous time, and I was reminded of the holiday special I wrote last year, as well. So, in lieu of a new post this week, may I direct you to...

How do you know how many coffee beans you have purchased (besides counting them out, that is)? Coffee is generally measured by weight (not by volume). In the U.S., this may be in pounds, but for the rest of the world, it’s in kilograms. So how ...

How long do you expect your electronics to last? Depends on the device, I expect. A mobile phone may last a few years; a laptop may last five years or so, a television may last maybe ten years or more. What about an automobile? Maybe fifteen years? (...

Have you ever heard of the Trolley Problem ? According to Wikipedia, the Trolley Problem is this: You see a runaway trolley moving toward five tied-up (or otherwise incapacitated) people lying on the tracks. You are standing next to a lever that cont...

At Cadence, we have recently switched over our printer system. Before, everyone in an office was hooked up to a communal printer that when you print something, you have to run to the printer down the hall to pick it up. God forbid it is something sen...

Look around, look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now…—Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton Every once in a while, I write a post like this one, to highlight some of the amazing things that are happening in the world of electroni...

You know how, when geese are flying in a group, they form a V-shape? This is because of the slipstream in the air. Geese take turns being in the leadership position, and the other geese benefit from the reduced energy output required to make their mi...

…to which Montgomery Scott immediately replied, “Now, you’re an engineer.”—Star Trek Original series, season 2, episode 4: Mirror, Mirror, October 6, 1967 The original Star Trek was trailblazing in so many ways. This ...

There’s a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one…—Malvina Reynolds In the cubicle environment, one often overhears conversation. I usually tune out conversation that is irrelevant to me, but sometimes random wo...

You may know something about deep learning and machine learning when it comes to visual applications. Using various filters (or convolutions) and other methods of interpreting visual data, the layers of processing that data can, for example, identify...

“Oh no! Automation is going to cause massive job losses, causing the downfall of society itself!” shriek the pundits who look at employment figures. Now, this may be true. There’s no question that robots and automation have already ...

I spend a lot of time commuting, as I generally drive around 80 miles a day to get to and from work. With that time in my car, I also spend a lot of time sitting in traffic. Now, I get a lot of reading done on these trips—thanks, recorded books...

“Prediction is difficult, especially the future.” — Niels Bohr Okay, in my post last week, I revealed that I was a deterministic Newtonian, and my reasoning was about two hundred years old. I posited, “If I could identify al...

The fires in Northern California and floods in the east coast and the heat waves affecting most of the northern hemisphere this summer have me thinking about climate change and climate modeling. After writing last week’s post about quantum comp...

Recently I ran into Lip-Bu Tan, our CEO, after one of his round-table talks, and asked him what he’s been reading lately. He said (and I paraphrase because I didn’t have my notebook with me to write it down verbatim), “I have been r...