The Evolution of Conference Schwag

I noticed a lonely unused USB drive in my desk today, and it got me thinking about the hoops that we engineers will jump through to get a conference giveaway. It's an arms race!

In the beginning, there was the t-shirt ...

I just took a box full of bags and backpacks to the donation station ...

USB drives were once precious ...

An iPod is still a pretty cool gift ...

But today's holy grail is the iPad.

Note, none of the pictures are of my schwag. I grabbed photos available under Creative Commons license.

Synopsys/ Magma - Gary Smith's take

Gary Smith gives his informed perspective on Synopsys/ Magma - Great Acquisition, Difficult Merger :: Gary Smith EDA. I like that he names names with respect to which Synopsys products aren't cutting it. On paper, it seemed like a great deal of overlap between the two companies. But Gary argues that Synopsys wasn't competitive in several of these areas, and the Magma tools will give them a stronger line-up.

This point is hard to argue with:

The static timing analyzer will be a big issue with the customer base. With their recent acquisition of Extreme DA, and now Magma, Synopsys has regained their Franchise position in the important Static Timing market. This is not a good thing for the design engineer. Only competition drives tool improvements.

But how's this for bravado?

Magma brags that they can achieve better results with a five man team than Synopsys can with a fifty man team.

That's the sort of claim I might believe from an EDA startup; could a public company (no longer a spring chicken) be so agile, or is this coming from the supreme confidence of their CEO?

The Engadget Interview: ARM co-founder John Biggs

Happy New Year and welcome to 2012! The Engadget Interview: ARM co-founder John Biggs -- Engadget covers the interesting history, philosophy, and future of ARM Holdings. As you will learn from the article, it's a company that might never have been started were it not for Intel.

Unix's Long Strange Trip

If you love computers and history as much as I do, you'll enjoy The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix - IEEE Spectrum.

Such a wisely designed system to be pervasive after 40 years!

Snapdragon Buggy?

3D ICs Have a History

Steve’s Improbable History of 3D ICs? Six decades of 3D electronic packaging | EDA360 Insider is a great quick history (with pictures!) of 3-dimensional chips (actually, going back to the vacuum tube days).

Practical takeaway: stacked memory is clearly one of the killer apps for 21st-century 3D IC assembly.

SNUG Silicon Valley 2012 CFP

The Call for Papers is OPEN for SNUG Silicon Valley!

If you're a Synopsys tool user, please consider submitting a paper today for presentation at SNUG Silicon Valley. You can propose a paper by filling out a form and writing an abstract. Besides benefiting the engineering community at large, you'll develop your professional skills and raise your profile. We on the Tech Committee will help you!

Please visit the Call for Papers Web Page to check it out and submit your idea.