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Coming from Design Con 2017

Monday: He Who Goes First...Loses

Tuesday: He Who Goes First Loses, EDA Edition

Wednesday: TSMC Automotive Strategy

Thursday: Book on Circuits and Systems for Security and Privacy

Friday...

Congratulations to the IEEE-1647 e Functional Verification Language Working Group (eWG)

In the beginning of 2017, the IEEE-1647 eWG issued for publication IEEE Std 1647™ 2016, IEEE Standard for the Functional Verification Language e. This version of the standard, issued under the chairmanship of Darren Galpin from Infineon, with input from other members from the EDA industry, contains enhancements of the e language…

One of the first posts I wrote here at Breakfast Bytes was Where Does 5 Really Mean 30? about process node naming. One company that is heavily involved with process nodes is ASML, and they have attempted to standardize nomenclature to a "standard node...

At the no-longer-so-recent Jasper User Group JUG last year, the keynote was by Erik Seligman. He is one of three authors, along with Tom Schubert and the very nautically named MV Achutha Kiran Kumar (MV stands for motor vessel and is used in front of...

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays, Scott Jacobson wraps up his three-part series on Ethernet by focusing on what Ethernet is like today, and how it has expanded into applications like automotive and industrial control.

https://youtu.be/KdOS1SECj90

There are lots of claims to be the first computer, depending on your definition of "computer". Babbage's difference engine was clearly a computer of sorts, although not electronic. His analytical engine was even programmable. But it was finally completed...

Creating a neat and organized schematic is extremely important, and often requires a great deal of forward planning and effort. Placing, aligning, and distributing objects can be time-consuming, if performed manually. However, improvements to the Cadence Virtuoso Schematic Editor accelerates and simplifies this design entry process. New Align and Distribute options simplify placing the objects in a more systematic manner…

Last night was the annual Kaufman Award dinner to present the award to this year's honoree, who is Andrzej Strojwas. I say "this year" but in fact this was the 2016 Kaufman Award. The dinner is usually held in October or November but this year it slipped...

https://youtu.be/NxgrCMJYRew

Coming from Kaufman Award Dinner

Monday: The Kaufman Award Dinner honors Andrzej Strojwas

Tuesday: Embargoed announcement

Wednesday: Formal Verification Book Review

Thursday: ASML Standard Node

Friday: Handling Variability...

SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics, with the purpose of “advancing an interdisciplinary approach to the science and application of light”. What everyone calls "spie", however, is actually the SPIE Advanced...

In a recent a16z presentation, Frank Chen, a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz, says that everything that moves will eventually go autonomous. To be honest, a lot of that was clear at CES recently, where autonomous cars and drones were ubiquitous. If there...

One of the hottest areas in systems right now is deep learning: neural networks, machine learning, machine vision, convolutional neural networks. There are, obviously, differences between these, depending on the application, but one thing they have...

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, the second in a three-part series, Scott Jacobson describes the birth and formative years of Ethernet, including the contributions of co-inventor Bob Metcalfe whose vision for information sharing built on earlier efforts including the Aloha Network and the Xerox Networking System.

https://youtu.be/MCO8pieJzbo

Cadence today announced that its next-generation Virtuoso® Analog Design Environment (ADE) product suite has won a Product of the Year award from Electronic Products magazine. This year marks Electronic Products’ 41st annual Product of the Year awards, recognizing the best products in the industry.  Over the last 2 years, we have worked very hard to advance the cause of analog design and electrical verification…

It's that time of year when pundits try and predict major changes that will happen in 2017. I suppose I'm a pundit, so here are my predictions. I'm at least honest enough to go back and see what I said last year and whether any of those predictions...

The Electronic System Design Alliance (fka EDAC) has been organizing evening meetings every 6 months or so, under the auspices of the emerging companies. These are hosted by Jim Hogan. The latest one took place last week at Cadence and was about two...

You heard it right! It’s Virtuoso Abstract Generator, the popular library modeling tool that lets you create abstracts from detailed layout information in various formats. Abstracts, when used for routing instead of full layouts, result in improved performance of place-and-route tools, such as the Cadence® Innovus™ Implementation System and the Cadence® Encounter™ Digital Implementation System (EDI System).…

Automotive was huge at CES. A lot of it went for the glamour without really having much electronics, concept cars which will never see the light of day. But increasingly cars are about electronics. As I told someone recently, a couple of years ago, nobody...

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Nimrod Reiss takes a closer look at the verification challenges engineers face when working on interconnect designs.

https://youtu.be/C0ym6CWDwZE

It's the start of the year, plus the Consumer Electronics Show is over. I've already written about the things that I thought were most significant. One area where I am sure we will be hearing a lot during 2017 is security.

We ended...

As you incrementally build your design and decompose the layout geometry into masks or colors, you may want to change the color already applied to a shape or a set of shapes. At the same time, you may want the color of some shapes to stay unchanged. So, you lock the color on such shapes, because, by default, color shifting is not permitted on locked shapes. But what about the conflicts that occur when you end up locking…

Despite all of the recent political tensions, Russia remains an attractive market for microelectronics and EDA software. Cadence has two offices in Russia: one medium-sized R&D office in the center of Moscow, and one office in Zelenograd, outside of Moscow...

Steve Mollenkopf, the CEO of Qualcomm, gave one of the keynotes at the Consumer Electronics Show recently. Of course Qualcomm is historically a huge fabless semiconductor company that sells mostly into the mobile market with chips under the Snapdragon...

What is Bluetooth 5? 4.2? Bluetooth Classic? Bluetooth Smart? Low Energy? The naming is confusing, for sure.

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (which sounds like a dental convention) announced Bluetooth 5 last June and officially adopted it in December...