Big Changes at EE Times, Cadence Gets More Social

I'm sorry to see EE Times and its sister publications ending their print runs after many years. In my career, it was the original and most highly valued industry news source. It was a thrill to "qualify" for a subscription and receive the first issue addressed to me in my first job.

Several top media types have now landed at Cadence as they beef up their social media presence. The latest is former EE Times editor Brian Fuller, as announced in Right Turn on Seely Avenue -- A New Blog from Brian Fuller.

Both Synopsys and Cadence are making significant efforts in reaching social media, and it's interesting to see the different approaches. Synopsys has long been cultivating in-house talent and has first-mover advantage. Cadence has taken a shortcut by hiring top-notch journalists.

We can enjoy both perspectives, but certainly miss the more objective reporting formerly provided by third-party media.

Qualcomm Co-Founder on Life & Keys to Success

Nice profile of one of Qualcomm's founders. It's remarkable what humble aspirations the company started with, and where they are today. I believe their first major success was a radio network for trucking fleets!

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!

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.

Steve Jobs’s Best Quotes

In honor of Steve Jobs on the day of his resignation as Apple CEO: Steve Jobs’s Best Quotes - Digits - WSJ. I'm most inspired by the things he has to say about design, and life. And most amused by what he says about Microsoft.

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.

Jean Jennings Bartik, a Computer Pioneer

Some pretty cool very early computer history from this obituary: Jean Jennings Bartik, a Computer Pioneer, Dies at 86 - NYTimes.com. Also, Jean Bartik on Wikipedia. Greatest Generation Pioneers, thank you for your contribution to the United States and the Computing profession.

Cooley's Take on IPO Candidate Apache Design

Props to John Cooley for his article looking at Apache Design's history and products. It's been 10 years since the last EDA IPO? Surprising and troubling. Let's hope it's less than a decade for the next one.

Email from John:

           http://www.deepchip.com/gadfly/gad031811.html

     INDUSTRY GADFLY: "A brief history of Apache and its IPO"

                         by John Cooley

  On Monday, Apache Design Solutions, Inc. (APAD) filed to IPO for
  $75 million as a publically traded stock on the NASDAQ.

  The last company to successfully IPO in EDA was 10 years ago.  It
  was Magma, which raised $63 million back in 2001....

           http://www.deepchip.com/gadfly/gad031811.html

RISC versus CISC, Who is #Winning?

As you may know, I have a soft spot for technology history. I loved going to HotChips and hearing all the old bearded geeks debate CPU architectures, and why x86 often wins despite its warts.

I was delighted to find this couple of blog posts by UC Berkeley Computer Science professor David Patterson, one of the giants of computer architecture (and founding member of the RISC Fan Club):

1. RISC versus CISC Wars in the PrePC and PC Eras - Part 1
2. RISC versus CISC Wars in the PostPC Eras - Part 2 - ARM Community

If RISC and CISC start to look more like one another as they steal good ideas from each other, the architecture won't determine the "winner". Rather, it will hinge on other vital issues such as process technology (Intel wins) and openness (ARM, MIPS lead here).

Finally, if I may add a sophomoric comment, doesn't Prof. Patterson's mug shot remind you of Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard)?

Books About EDA

I'm intrigued by EDAgraffiti, a new book on our industry and plan to buy a copy. See this good review by Clive Maxfield.

Before that, the only other book I had seen on EDA was about the start of the ASIC industry, Silicon Destiny: The Story of Application Specific Integrated Circuits and Lsi Logic Corporation, which is pretty hard to find.

Birth of a World Beater

If you followed the Consumer Electronics Show news at all last week, you heard a lot about ARM, ARM, ARM. Mindshare-wise, it would appear to have Intel on the defensive. (I wonder how Intel feels about selling off their StrongARM now?)

I plan to learn more about ARM's architecture and products. For today's history lesson, Birth of a world beater features one of the original ARM designers.

I'm curious to learn the technical merits of the ARM architecture. Is it inherently superior? Or is the main advantage the scads of software eco-system available, with low-power coming from standard implementation and process tricks?

Technical superiority and business success don't always go hand-in-hand, anyway. I've attend HOTChips before, and I was amused how all the microprocessor experts there bemoaned x86's incredible success, even though they knew it was inferior to [insert your favorite CPU here];. x86 was just good enough to survive, and had been in the right place at the right time. Is now the time for ARM?

A Concise Story of the ASIC/EDA Business

Check out Jim Hogan's article, The evolution of design methodology.

Past history is crystal clear and his description spot on. His assessment of current and future value-add is plausible and thought provoking. Sounds dire for many silicon-centric companies, though. Will you be a survivor? What does it say for the fortunes of the EDA industry? His answer seems to be focus on system/software, complemented by C-based hardware design.

LSI Logic's 30th reunion!

Who's who at LSI Logic's 30th reunion gives a great synopsis of the pioneering company in the ASIC/EDA industry. To read the whole story, track down a copy of Silicon Destiny: The Story of Application Specific Integrated Circuits and Lsi Logic Corporation, by Rob Walker, one of the founders of LSI Logic. (I have an autographed edition!)

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.

Will Cadence Take Away the Punch Bowl?

Big news in the world of EDA business this week, with Cadence to buy Denali for $315 million.

Though as an implementation guy, I don't use Denali products, the first things that sprang to mind are:

• $315 million is a lot of money! I think it must be one of the top 10 EDA acquisitions by price, if not top five. Anyone have list of the top acquisitions in EDA? It'd be fascinating to review the list and how those deals turned out.

  Off the top of my head guess list of bigger deals: CCT (Cadence), Ambit (Cadence), Avant! (Synopsys). Maybe ViewLogic (Synopsys), Verisity (Cadence).

• Cadence has been ambivalent or downright antagonistic toward the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in the past few years. Denali, on the other hand, is one of DAC's biggest boosters, and throws the party to attend in all of DAC. It will be tragic if Cadence clamps down on the festivities.

On a more somber note, let's hope that Cadence is able to preserve the technology and brain trust that was able to make Denali a well-established mid-level EDA vendor. Cadence has had mixed success in managing acquisitions, with some apparently not paying off (Ambit) and others holding up well (Verplex).

Old but Not Dead Languages

How can it possibly be that in this survey of programming language popularity, the C programming language is back at number 1 position?

I love technology history more than the average person, but I am dumb-founded that with all the software engineering development, object-oriented design, and graphical user interface work that's happened over the decades, we are relying on a language designed before many practicing engineers were born! (People may complain about Verilog HDL's crustiness, but it's "only" 25 years old.)

Though software engineering is not my principal occupation, I do enjoy programming and languages. I know "C" well enough to quickly shoot myself in the foot, but think Java is a far more elegant language. It's sort of like I've heard that Python is a better scripting language, but everyone still uses Perl.

Anyone have explanations for why "C" remains so popular? Isn't this a significant reason why computers have so many security holes? When you hear about "buffer overrun" and "malicious code execution", think "C" pointers! I can see using "C" for embedded systems if resources are very limited, but otherwise, I'm truly surprised by this survey.

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.

Synthesis Gets Interesting

As a pleasant surprise, there's quite a bit of activity and emerging excitement in the area of synthesis, just in time for this year's DAC.

Physical Synthesis

Oasys Design Systems has come out of stealth mode with rather incredible performance claims.

It's exciting to hope for a revolution in synthesis. Put me in the "show-me" camp. It's (relatively) easy to meet 80% of what Design Compiler can do, but there are many features and tricks developed by DC over the years, making it a hard tool to displace. Synopsys has certainly seen strong competition, including from Ambit BuildGates (acquired by Cadence) and most recently by Get2Chip (now Cadence RTL Compiler). What often happens is not that king DC is overthrown, but that the competition lights a fire under Synopsys and their tools will improve at a much faster pace than market dominance would dictate.

What's interesting about Oasys are the tremendous claims about capacity and run time, and the emphasis on physical synthesis, combining logic synthesis with placement and optimization. The company also has impressive board members, including Sanjiv Kaul (former implementation GM at Synopsys) and, re-appearing to EDA after a long hiatus, Joe Costello (charismatic and successful former Cadence CEO).

ESL Synthesis

For several years, EDA industry analyst Gary Smith has been calling for the ascent of ESL (Electronic System Level) design. He was already called an ESL evangelist back in 2006! It's been the next big thing for a while now. It seems to follow the industry's progression from transistors to gates to RTL, but RTL remains the mainstream design method.

In the context of design implementation, ESL implies synthesis at a more abstract level than RTL. This year, there appears to be considerably more buzz, and not just from Gary. See, for example, recent posts by John Cooley and Richard Goering.

Key players include

• Forte Cynthesizer
• Mentor/synthesis CatapultC
• Cadence C-to-Silicon
• Bluespec
• Synfora Pico Extreme

My apologies for any I've overlooked--I'm learning about this field. One point of concern is that there isn't a consensus on design language/dialect, which varies by vendor over C, C++, SystemC, and proprietary languages/extensions. That can impede adoption. It was Design Compiler that established the de facto standard for Verilog RTL synthesis subset, and this provided a common point for customers (and competitors) to converge on.

It's nice to see continued innovation in this critical area of IC design, and merits further investigation.

You Probably Believe We've Landed on the Moon, too

Don't believe everything you read. There's an insightful behind the scenes exposé on DeepChip about a technology web site that turns out to be a marketing venue for a group of EDA start-ups. Nothing wrong with that, but the disclosure of who's behind it took some digging and questioning to tease out.

Of course, one would be naive to assume this doesn't happen elsewhere in the media. Even Mr. Cooley's beloved DeepChip, with its purported user-generated content, can be gamed. When you read a glowing endorsement of an EDA tool, ask yourself questions such as

• Who wrote this? Are they "anon"?
• Did they really write it? Or could it have been "ghost written" by the EDA vendor and submitted in the customer's name?
• What is the author's interest in the vendor? Does the author's company have a financial or other interest in the vendor's success?

Nothing beats the testimonial of someone you know and trust, other than your own hands-on evaluation.

p.s. in honor of Apollo 11's 40th anniversary, read more about Apollo Moon landing hoax conspiracy theories .