Executive Blogging

As seen on Dilbert.com:

Pretty funny, but hopefully not prevalent in our industry. For example, I recently started reading Jonathan's Blog by the CEO of Sun Microsystems, and it's pretty substantive and useful.

What's Special About This Number?

What's Special About This Number? was featured in IEEE Spectrum. It's an interesting list of factoids for past, present and future fans of mathematics.

Enjoy!

"How-to" SPICE Book

It's been several years since I've run SPICE myself, but I'm finding it increasingly needed even for a RTL/gate-level engineer. Could anyone recommend some really good SPICE books, which aren't just a reference but show you how to do things? You can post your recommendations and advice here as comments. The "things" I'd be most interested in doing would be characterizing digital standard cells and analyzing IC interconnect.

I looked at Amazon.com and didn't find a lot of books like this (no "SPICE for Dummies"?), but these two look interesting. Before I or my company spends a chunk of change, do you know these titles and how useful they are?

Legend of Test

Peggy Aycinena did a fine interview with Tom Williams, truly one of the giants in the field of Test. The guy invented full-scan DFT in the 1970s! Can you believe that? It's remarkable that his career spans 40 years, and he's been productive throughout. He's published many seminal Test papers, and has received the "Best Paper" award at DAC.

Be sure to go to the last page and see a list of his self-selected most important papers.

Hither ASIC

q.v. my earlier posting Whither ASIC, EE Times just ran a story on the declining activity in the ASIC business.

It's a thorough survey of what's happening in the business. I agree that designs need to see more IP reuse -- the extreme case is to use an ASSP. And I'm skeptical of Structured ASIC, and it seems the market has also given that idea the thumbs down. But the article didn't mention the trend of more fabless companies finding ways to do COT rather than ASIC design, possibly through "virtual ASIC vendors" like eSilicon or Open Silicon.

Intel to Build Fab in China

"Our goal in China is to support a transition from 'manufactured in China' to 'innovated in China'"
--Intel CEO Paul Otellini

Ah, globalization!

Whither ASIC

I'm surprised by how bad of shape the traditional ASIC business is in. Are any companies making money? Only IBM Microelectronics?

Several of the Japanese semiconductor powerhouses are cutting way back (or closing) their US ASIC engineering. Today a friend told me that LSI Logic isn't doing ASICs any more! Is that right?

The vendors that are doing the best have attractive IP portfolios, like IBM or TI. Those that historically relied on manufacturing process (e.g., Japanese) and left IP entirely up to the customer aren't faring well.

I'm especially surprised that even fabless chip startups aren't using ASIC vendors! They invest in the COT model or the "virtual ASIC" model, contracting with a number of service providers. I would have thought that the integration value-add of ASIC vendors would be even more attractive in these days of worrying about signal integrity, variability and DFM. Don't chip designers want "one throat to choke" when things going wrong?

We may not have ASIC vendors to kick around for long.

Britney Spears guide to Semiconductor Physics

Here's some fun on a Friday. EE Times gave me the link to this crucial technical reference, Britney Spears guide to Semiconductor Physics - The physics of optoelectronic technology . The material is technically sound and more accessible than a textbook.

Check it out if you don't mind gratuitous pictures of Ms. Spears. What's next, Paris Hilton's analysis of the Traveling Salesman Problem? (a Hilton ought to help with that ;-)

Immortal, Indeed

Those of you who read the print edition of EE Times may recall a funky little contest/feature that ran at the back of the paper, "Immortal Works". I think I can remember this *always* being part of the paper, even going back to the 1980s. Here's the latest version I could find.

Last month, EE Times went through a redesign. There are many changes to the organization and layout of the paper. It's actually printed on smaller (shorter and narrower) paper than before, in line with several major mainstream papers. More cost reductions from the ink and paper crowd, probably. I actually like the smaller format -- it's easier to carry around and peruse at opportune moments.

But I won't like if Immortal Works has been canned! It's missing from the redesigned print edition! According to the editors' explanation The new EE Times: more than a redesign:

Taking a hiatus will be Immortal Works, our longtime caption-writing contest of which many of you are devoted fans. We're moving the feature online, where the audience interaction is fast, efficient and easy.

Like I said, it was a sort of goofy feature. And even though I never had the time (or more likely, the wit) to submit an entry, I miss this quirky part of EE history! Immortal Works, where art thou?

Standards? EDA has lots of 'em!

While I'm pleased that the UPF power standard plans to converge with the rival Common Power Format (CPF), it begs the larger question: why should we have multiple standards organizations, anyway? I'm referring to Accelera, Si2, and the IEEE. It seems just the IEEE should be enough.

It's like professional boxing, where there are now so many sanctioning organizations (WBA, WBC, WBO, IBF, ...) that the average person has no idea who the real champions are, and no longer really cares, either.

CAD Engineer's Bookshelf

Inspired by the DFT Bookcase over at the DFT Digest blog, I decided to create pointers to the technical books I use every day in my work. (Yes, I looked the ones strewn about my desk and next to the computer, rather than those arranged neatly (and less used) on my bookshelf. Perhaps you'll discover a title or two that will help you.

	Great book for learning Perl -- it's how I learned, going through it from cover to cover. And I still use it for a basic reference.
	A surprisingly useful book. I can't count the number of times that I needed to solve some puzzle in Perl, and found it already grokked in this book.
	Lots of good ideas here. When you are going to pick a coding style, why not follow what they've already figured out?
	My newest addition. I'm enjoying working through it to learn about references, packages, and object-oriented Perl.
	Programming Perl is the "bible", though personally it's not my favorite. And I find Larry Wall's humour distracting.
	My go-to book for Tcl.
	Because, sometimes, a good ol' shell script is enough.

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?

That’s OK, the Corporate Raider took my backpack

Jonathan David is an active IEEE volunteer and he's the local chair of PACE, the career-oriented part of IEEE. He's written a nice post on career planning, Professions of a Silicon Valley Double-E: That’s OK, the Corporate Raider took my backpack. [on keeping your parachute ready].

It's a nice short read. One of the "takeaways" from his advice is that he highly recommends this book, which is surely a classic in career planning:

A Taste of DesignCon

I didn't go to DesignCon, but Gabe did, so let's sample his DesignCon Morsels.

What's nice is the variety of topics he touches on:

• The lack of interest in ESL vs. design implementation, and why engineers are being short-sighted by not getting into architecture.
• Thermal performance, an interdisciplinary problem. When I've been involved in thermal analysis, the biggest problem is coming up with a credible power consumption figure. It's back to the "vectors" problem, and what's a representative (or worst-case) simulation?
• Is DFM for Designers?
• Fewer students are going into Engineering. And engineers "get no respect", as Rodney Dangerfield would say.

Thanks Gabe, for the synopsis!

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!

Chips Grab Mainstream Headlines

I was surprised and excited to see a chip-process development featured on the front page, above the fold, in the San Jose Mercury News. This is "the newspaper of silicon valley", as they say. The headline gushed Chip advance biggest in 40 years.

It's about successes announced by Intel and IBM to fabricate metal-gate transistors with "high-K" dielectric. This is good news, which hopefully will enable us to continue to follow Moore's Law.

But it doesn't hit me that this is the biggest development in 40 years. Is this triumph over materials significantly different from figuring out how to to use Copper interconnect, or "low-K" interconnect isolation? Those were both hard manufacturing problems that the process wizards solved in the last decade. Maybe it was a slow news day. ;-)

Is Texas Instruments Exiting the Semiconductor Technology Rat Race?

SeekingAlpha is a financial web site that I just discovered. It's unique in that it focuses on analysis rather than news. And I've started following semiconductor company analyses, such as Is Texas Instruments Exiting the Semiconductor Technology Rat Race?

Technologists live for working on leading edge technology. TI killing off 32nm development is a major change in how it views itself and whether it will be able to attract the best and the brightest scientists in the future -- not to mention how the ones who do this there today must feel.

Now that is significant! Another IDM "throws in the towel" on doing all their own process and fab development. Will we be catching our breath at 45nm for awhile?

Yahoo! EDA!

Does Yahoo! understand the EDA industry? I have the headlines from their EDA News News Archive - Yahoo! Finance in "My Yahoo!". But most of the time, even a very liberal definition of "EDA" doesn't explain why these articles are here. I can understand including foundries, IP vendors, and even programmable logic companies. But how to understand the inclusion of U.S. Department Of Commerce Makes Annual Adjustments to Seasonal Factors for ISM Manufacturing PMI and Diffusion Indexes and ISM Non-Manufacturing Diffusion Indexes or Roche Diagnostics and Protedyne Sign Global Agreement?

I thought these industry news groupings have a human editor, but it makes you wonder ...

Intel Builds 80-Core Chip

This Intel 80-Core Chip is pretty far off in Research-land, but it does pose intriguing concepts, such as

• Better performance/power ratio
• Finer granularity of compute power and power consumption. If you need more performance, it wakes up more cores, and when you're done, they go back to sleep.
• "Core hopping". If one part of the chip gets hot, the work that those particular cores are doing is moved to other cores on another part of the chip.
• On-chip communications network. Of course, all multi-core chips have some sort of network. I'd like to see how sophisticated the Intel one is.

Prof. Richard Newton's Influence on the EDA Industry

Lamentation & Loss is a enlightening eulogy for Professor Richard Newton. By interviewing several EDA industry legends, Peggy Aycinena succeeds in recognizing Prof. Newton's profound impact on EDA, and reveals interesting history about Cadence and Synopsys, among others.