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This year's Phil Kaufman award recipient is Wally Rhines. I already knew the big picture history that Wally did a PhD at Stanford, then worked half his career for Texas Instruments before joining Mentor as CEO. I called Wally up to get some more color...

Every year one person in EDA is honored with the Phil Kaufman Award. As it says on the EDAC website:

Presented by the Electronic Design Automation Consortium and the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation, this award honors an individual who has...

Recently Tesla activated Autopilot for their vehicles, which are equipped with the appropriate sensors. To prepare for this addition, they have been shipping cars and SUVs for about a year with front-facing camera and radar and a collection of sensors...

Earlier this week was the Cadence Mixed-Signal Technology Summit. Since I was the emcee, I spent the entire day there and saw all the presentations. I am not going to try and detail everything that was said in every presentation: you had to be there!...

I’m taking a brief detour from the usual product technical details this week to mention (and in most cases – remind people) that the Cadence PCB Design and SI/PI Analysis Products provide Quarterly Incremental Releases – or QIRs. You can find brief descriptions of what’s contained in each QIR here. Near the bottom of each main product section (Allegro, Sigrity, OrCad) there is a “What’s New” link…

Ever since Pat Gelsinger, then CTO of Intel, shocked everyone with his power graphs, the design world has been more concerned about power than almost anything else. Pat pointed out that if we kept increasing clock rates then the power density of an Intel...

On Saturday I attended the Chinese American Semiconductor Professional Association (CASPA) annual conference and dinner. You might have noticed that I am not Chinese 可是我会说中文，虽然我不是流利。I seem to have been a sort of honorary member since I moderated a panel...

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Moshik Rubin takes a closer look at the latest trends for the MIPI protocol standard.

https://youtu.be/Zg-1nNU6yr0

On the third Thursday of each month the IEEE Computer Society of Silicon Valley has a meeting. Very conveniently for me, it is held in the building 10 auditorium on the Cadence campus. This month's presentation was by Professor Fred Barez of San Jose...

Between about 2000 and 2010, there were a number of startup companies that attempted to commercialize the idea of virtual platforms: Axys Design Automation, Virtio, VaST Systems Technology, Virtutech, CoWare, Imperas, Carbon Design Systems. In some strange...

ARM Acquires Carbon

ARM announced that it had acquired Carbon Design Systems. They were one of the remaining independent virtual platform companies. They started focused on accelerating RTL models by throwing away detail, resulting in much faster C...

Next Thursday, October 29, 2015, the Electronic Design Automation Consortium (EDAC) is organizing an evening on patents and patent litigation. This is partially due to the US Patent and Trademark Office opening a Silicon Valley office in San Jose. This...

Release Highlights July 2015
Some nice enhancements to the COS experience. Ability to set preferred release for searching, better interface for navigating search results in product manuals.

Using Case Groups: User Roles and Sub-Group
This video shows the functionality provided by Cadence Online Support to share viewing and administering of Cases

Virtuoso Analog Design Environment…

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a key technique for image recognition. As Wired Magazine put it a few years ago, “Google’s Artificial Brain Learns to Find Cat Videos.”

“Artificial Brain” may be going a bit far, but neural networks...

Setting the Release Preferences for your search results: The documents in the search results page often support multiple releases. You now have the option to set preferred release(s) for your default search on the home page search. Check out My Support – My Accounts and Preferences, Release Preferences. For example, you may set “IC 6.1.6” as the preferred release and ensure that…

As a lead design engineer on the Tensilica R&D team, Dr. Avinash Lingamneni certainly understands the trials and tribulations of developing always-on applications for the Internet of Things (IoT), wearable, and wireless markets. His team develops Cadence’s Tensilica Fusion DSP. Over the summer, Avinash, who has a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Rice University, discussed energy-efficient signal processing…

You have probably seen the Back to the Future trilogy. In Back to the Future II Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to a day in the future. When they made the movie in 1989, they picked a day 25 years out, unimaginably far into the future. But the exact...

In this week’s Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Jacek Duda talks about the components of the Cadence IP solution for USB Type-C, including USB Type-C port controller, multi-protocol PHY, DisplayPort transmitter, and Tensilica Xtensa DSP.

https://youtu.be/SBuh0KKRpvw

The MIPI CSI-2 (Camera Serial Interface) specification is celebrating its tenth birthday these days and the party is quite big with millions of mobile devices out there, passing every pixel from the camera sensor to the application processor through this interface.

The success of this protocol is due to a very robust architecture that enables high-speed traffic with low power consumption and cost-effective implementation…

The original USB connector seems to be the only connector where it is always the wrong way up. Everyone has had the experience of trying to insert a USB connector, finding it won't go, turning it over. It still won't insert. Turn it back to the first...

When I lived in England, newspapers had a tradition of not mentioning other newspapers by name, they would just say "in another newspaper." In that tradition, I sat down to lunch last week with Karen Bartleson of "another EDA company." She had recently...

Earlier in the year Avago announced that it was acquiring Broadcom for $37B (the merged company will lose the Avago name and the whole company will be Broadcom). This week an even bigger tech merger was announced: Dell announced...

The two obvious ways to implement a complex algorithm are to write a large amount of RTL and synthesize a specialized hardware block, or write a large amount of C and run it on a microprocessor.

The RTL approach has the potential for producing an optimal...