Saluting the Father of our Foundry

A well-deserved congratulations to Dr. Morris Chang, recipient of the 2011 IEEE Medal of Honor. IEEE Spectrum magazine has published a fascinating profile of his professional life in Morris Chang: Foundry Father - IEEE Spectrum.

The article quotes numerous industry luminaries to frame his impact. It's hard to overstate what Dr. Chang's accomplishments have done for so many of the industries that we work in: fabless semiconductor, EDA, ASIC, ... I found the article to be full of fascinating tidbits, such as

• His first job paid $480 per month.
• At the beginning, he was a self-taught semiconductor engineer. He spent countless hours after work to learn about new fields.
• He was a highly successful TI executive before "starting over" to create a new industry from scratch in Taiwan.
• On several occasions, he left good companies when things weren't working out, with no immediate job prospects. He had the confidence that he'd find a good opportunity.
• Dr. Chang didn't become fabulously wealthy from founding TSMC! He's well-off, for sure, but a US executive would have made sure to ensure his success first.

Innovation In EDA

Each year, EDN magazine has a contest to select the most innovative electronic design products: EDN 2010 Innovation Award finalists:Are you inspired?

The nominees in EDA Tools and ASIC Technologies are

• Calibre InRoute, Mentor Graphics. (is this Mentor's answer to Synopsys IC Validator, a winner from last year?)
• DRC+, GlobalFoundries
• PathFinder, Apache Design Solutions
• SoftPatch for RocketVision, GateRocket Inc

Looking back at 2010 EDN Innovation Award winners, there were multiple categories of EDA-related awards, and thus many more EDA nominees. From each category, the winners were

• Quartus II Version 9.1 FPGA-design tool, Altera
• IC Validator in-design physical-verification solution, Synopsys
• Virtuoso Accelerated Parallel Simulator, Cadence Design Systems

There's a New Supercomputer in Town

Well, not in my town, but China has made a great leap forward to nab the lead in the Top 500 Supercomputer list, as described in NVIDIA Tesla GPUs Power World's Fastest Supercomputer

It's exciting to see GPU Computing gaining traction and accolades for certain highly parallel applications. I'm anxiously looking forward to GPU Computing helping to solve EDA problems. So far, there's been some nibbling around the edges and algorithms experimented with, but I'm not aware of production EDA products based on GPU. Yet. What EDA applications would most benefit from massively parallel processing, such as is offered by a GPU?

2010 IEEE Medal of Honor Winner: Andrew J. Viterbi

Interesting profile of one of the giants of modern day technology, who's contributions we use and design with every day: IEEE Spectrum: 2010 Medal of Honor Winner: Andrew J. Viterbi.

SNUG's Happy Birthday

Early this month the Synopsys Users' Group conference was held in Santa Clara, California. It was a special SNUG, as it was the 20th anniversary. That's an eternity in EDA.

The conference featured record attendance (over 2,100) and a good balance of user papers on verification, implementation, signoff, and low-power design.

• Art de Geus' keynote. It's the much-anticipated "state of Synopsys" (and EDA, the semiconductor industry, and world economy).
• Award-winning papers. Congratulations to the everyone who presented a paper.
• Press Release. Includes list of awarded papers.

CS Gravitas

It's hard to imagine greater evidence of a tremendous impact on computer science than authoring the most cited paper in all of computer science as well as in EDA. Remarkable! Before you follow the links, can you guess the subject of the paper?

Find the answer in Gabe Moretti's Kaufman Award Dinner Notes. Good links and amusing pictures are in the coverage at SCD Source. And to delve deeper into the subject, see the Wikipedia article.

Aart de Geus Profiled in IEEE "The Institute"

The IEEE's monthly newspaper, The Institute, features Synopsys CEO Aart de Geus for its monthly "member profile". The article recognizes both his business accomplishments in founding Synopsys, and his significant community support, especially in the area of education. See Aart de Geus: At the Heart of High-Tech.

Prestigious Turing Award presented for Model Checking

Dr. Dobb's Journal: 2007 Turing Award Winners Announced gives details on the recipient of the annual Turing Award, one of the most prestigious awards in Computer Science. It's nice to see an EDA field being so recognized-- I've always admired the complexity of EDA problems and the intellectual power harnessed to solve them.

My impression is that Model Checking is still a nascent field of EDA, yet these guys invented it way back in the early 1980s! Talk about a long gestation period.

Has their work directly gone into any current-day EDA tools? Is there a rightful heir to this seminal innovation?

All-time Most Influential Technologists

Intel ... assembled a panel of experts including academics, journalists and independent third parties to vote on technology's 45 most influential people: HEXUS.net - Headline :: Intel lists its 45 most influential technologists : Page - 1/1

This is really an esteemed list. Tim Berners-Lee deserves a Nobel prize for the impact that the Web has had, and will have, on the world. I wouldn't put the founders of Google so high, though. Isn't Google just the search engine du jour? If this list was made a few years ago, would the founders of Yahoo or even (shudder) Netscape or AOL have been listed?

Who else doesn't belong? Who else is missing?

Check out the comments below the article for Wikipedia links to biographies.

Aart de Geus, Renaissance Man

Congratulations are in order for Aart de Geus, Synopsys' CEO. Last week, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group honored him with its Spirit of Silicon Valley Lifetime Achievement Award. Read all about it in San Jose Mercury News - Takahashi: Synopsys leader's quiet impact.

I had the pleasure of attending the awards banquet, since my company purchased a table.

The keynote speaker for the luncheon was California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's the first time I've seen and heard "Ahnold" live, and he is quite impressive. He is very charismatic and his answers to audience questions made a great deal of sense. Of course, sound bites are easy and the devil is in the details when enacting policies and making hard choices. Voters are not easy to please. (We'll have our cake and eat it too, please.)

But enough of the Governator. For Aart, there was a fine tribute video shown with testimonials from business and community leaders. Aart was gracious and humble in his acceptance, noting all the contributions from his family, the Synopsys Foundation, and his colleagues in the Leadership Group.

Aart has been a true leader in the local community and Synopsys has been especially strong supporting Education and Science Fairs. Congratulations on a well deserved honor!

Ambric Multi-Core Design Wins Award

I like this press release: Ambric Wins In-Stat's 2006 Microprocessor Report Analysts' Choice Award for Innovation because of two eye-catching features:

• the claim that this multi-core design was first architected for easy programming, before creating the hardware architecture. I agree with the claim that "most massively-parallel chip companies started with the hardware, leaving the programming model almost as an afterthought".
• the implementation is globally asynchronous, locally synchronous (GALS). Man, that is sexy! ;-) I've been interested of commercial implementations of this more-efficient clocking approach.

I'm going to watch for Ambric and try to learn more about their designs. By the way, interesting caveat in the quotes: "If Ambric's tools work as well as the company promises, ..." Ain't that always the challenge?

Dr. Thomas W. Williams to Receive EDAA Lifetime Achievement Award

Saw this over at DFT Digest: Synopsys Fellow Dr. Thomas W. Williams to Receive EDAA Lifetime Achievement Award

Look at all Dr. Williams' achievements, stretching back to the 1970s. This is (one of) the father of LSSD, which begat the full scan DFT methodology that we all use today. He's truly a giant in DFT one of the legendary early figures in EDA.

Congratulations on a well-deserved honor!

Two Win Prestigious Engineering Award - New York Times

Two Win Prestigious Engineering Award - New York Times

Cool! It's nice to see a couple of great engineers prominently recognized for their great contribution to technology (37 years after the invention of the CCD)!

The Dangers of Living with an X (Bugs Hidden in your Verilog)

The Dangers of Living with an X (Bugs Hidden in your Verilog) is a technical paper that is important for ASIC design and verification engineers. It's an exhaustive analysis of interpretation of the 'X' value in Verilog HDL. This detail is often misunderstood and can be dangerous in design. The paper was originally presented at SNUG. It says the author won the Technical Committee award. I'm surprised he didn't win additional awards -- it's one of the best ASIC design papers I've read.

Tenzing Norgay Interoperability Achievement Award?

This has long struck me as the most incongruous award in our industry: ARM Recipient of Synopsys Fifth Annual Tenzing Norgay Interoperability Achievement Award. Yes, I know who Tenzing Norgay is, but the connection to EDA??? It reminds me so much of Apple using pictures of Einstein and Gandhi to promote their products.

Interoperability plays a key role in elevating designers to a higher level of productivity, just as Tenzing Norgay's efforts facilitated the first ascent to the top of Mount Everest, said Rich Goldman, vice president, Strategic Alliance at Synopsys.

Ah, it all makes sense now. ;-)