One of the funniest blogs going right now is
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.
Lots of unfiltered opinions about the Electronics and Entertainment (media) industries.
It's a parody, but some of the posts are scathingly spot-on.
Oh, and it's rated PG-13 for language. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Jonathan Schwartz could have been paraphrasing me when mentioning those unimpressed by Sun's latest CPU announcements.
Those who love desktop computers thought we were daft. Here we had what looked like a slow chip, optimized for something no home user really cared about (lowering power bills, running multiple OS's and minimizing space). And to make matters worse, we removed support for floating point precision math on the chip - to save more power and space. Desktop users (who play games that often feast on floating point processes) thought we were loons, but most datacenters didn't notice (very few datacenters use floating point).
But his blog posting Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog: Hugging Customers (Not Trees) shows that there's a method in Sun's madness. Might Sun be able to compete with Intel after all? Let's hope so, as competition is good for the industry, and AMD has been struggling against Intel recently.
The Failure Analysis equipment is super-high tech. I learned a few things about how chips are made to tell their secrets. Also see the campus, compute farm, cafeteria, and even the beloved high-tech coffee machine!
I couldn't find his blog. The link is to an audio interview puff piece. I've always wanted someone to write the whole story of Avant!'s theft of source code from Cadence: how they did it, and most incredibly, what were they thinking? It would be a business thriller, no doubt.
It's sad that one conspirator (an EE PhD) ended up going to prison at San Quentin while the CEO walked free and is doing business in Asia.
I wanted to poll blog readers for their experiences and recommendations on technical training. Specifically, I'm looking for a System Verilog for Design class. Have you taken one of these and what did you think? In general, what has been your experience with HDL or EDA training?
For the class I'm looking for, I found these providers
But upon a little more reflection, I have to agree with Larry Dignan of ZDNet that AMD’s triple core chip is a nice intersection where engineering meets business savvy.
Of course! It's not a three chip design. It's the four-core Phenom chip with one defective core disabled. AMD gets to salvage a "non-prime" part, and the consumer should get a good deal on a CPU that's better than dual-core.
This is a nice side benefit of highly-parallel designs, as long as they're designed to degrade gracefully.
several folks noted that one of the saving graces—one of the things that will seemingly prevent EDA from getting hit too hard by Piracy--is that EDA software tends to be extremely buggy-- Websites offering a Synopsys tool for $20? EDA pirates or legit? - Between The Lines - Blog on EDN
I've been banging my head against the wall the past few days trying to debug EDA software that the AE hasn't been able to figure out, and now this! Do EDA vendors intentionally let software quality wane to ensure maintenance revenues and prevent piracy? I always love a good conspiracy theory ...
With respect to EDA, here's what caught my eye:
Former EE Times editor Brian Fuller recaps a spontaneous debate between semiconductor panelists regarding what field your children are studying.
It's a touchy subject among engineers. Most of us still love engineering. But, we may have seen career frustrations, especially in the aftershocks of the .com bubble bursting. In America, there's the sense that some small percentage of engineers do fantastically well if they join the right start-up, but most enjoy an above-average though not large lifestyle. It seems like the folks doing really well and making it look easy are the lawyers and MBAs.
Brian presents the two points of view in Greeley's Ghost: Panel dispatches. Peggy the EDA analyst has kids studing hard sciences -- good for her. Jack Harding, former Cadence CEO, has kids studying Liberal Arts. Fair enough (as long as it's a "respectable" Liberal Art ;-). But what I found interesting was his justification:
It's where you sit in the value chain that makes the difference." IBM, he argues, doesn't make money on its technology development. It makes money taking other people's technology and finding ways to make profit on it. It's hiring not engineers but liberal arts and business people. In housing, he added, the contractor takes the risk and gets the margin. The plumbers, framers and electricians he hires (you can't build the house without 'em!) get an hourly wage.
Grudgingly, I'd have to admit there's truth to this. But it's really more of a justification of the value of an executive over an individual contributor. And who says that executives can't be engineers?
But, lately I've become concerned about cutbacks.
Maybe this is the inevitable consequence, but lately I've noticed that many of their features are written by industry sources rather than full-time journalists. In moderation, this isn't a bad thing. Practicing engineers can give a valuable real-world perspective on problems we're seeing and how to solve them. But in excess, I'm worried that EE Times will become a collection of "advertorials". Indeed, some of the articles I read from "industry voices" proceed to describe some very specific, not widely recognized problem, and then lay out a solution: which, coincidentally, happens to be exactly the problem the author's company addresses! This can be self-serving and less than objective.
Let's hope that industry publications will strike a healthy balance between problems encountered by in-the-trenches engineers and objective analysis of the major issues and trends. There is significant value in traditional journalism. What else are you gonna do, get all your news and opinions from blogs??? :-)
Intel and the Power of Having a Monopoly - Seeking Alpha is an analysis of Intel's long-term business prospects from an investment advisor's perspective. The author concludes that Intel has a very bright future.
Reading it, it makes it sound as though AMD might was well raise the white flag right now. Intel is the Borg.
I think this analysis is mostly right, but AMD has surprised us once in the past. It will be interesting to watch if they can come back to fight another day.
I like Gary Smith's perspective, even though I don't agree with all of his picks. His picks I'm not familiar with are interesting, and for the tools that I use or am interested in, I know that his take is pretty good.
Interesting that the authors are from Cadence. I didn't know they were big players in the STA arena. I know they have an "Encounter" timing system, but I'm not familiar with how advanced or accepted it is.
The article reinforces my view that statistical STA is "not ready for PrimeTime". That pun is not a slam against Synopsys! I mean that there needs to be a lot more support from the foundries and understanding by the design community before there's much adoption of SSTA for production chip timing.
Another good article, which was just published and is written by Extreme DA's founder, is Statistical static timing analysis: A view from the future.
For some of these, I'm very familiar and interested in what they're doing. For others, I can hardly understand how their technology works and how likely it is to catch on. I'll let you determine the What's Hot and What's Not for yourselves, but this list can get it started.
I had to do a double-take when I read Gabe Moretti's column The Week after DAC: some lingering thoughts | EDA DesignLine. Buried therein was the comment about "where the industry is going, a clear indication came this week with the layoff of Richard Goering, the deacon of the EDA journalists core". At first I skimmed over this, thinking that he was talking about Gary Smith, whose departure from Dataquest has been previously lamented. But no, Richard Goering, the main EDA journalist at EE Times forever, has been laid off!
This is a sad development, both for what it may say about the EDA and Journalism industries (I love both), and personally for Mr. Goering, whose writing I have long admired. Let's hope he lands on his feet and happily applies his skills elsewhere.
Other mentions of the news:
This morning's paper has a story about "private equity" firms being interested in investing in Cadence: Cadence would offer buyer steady cash flow. And, an investing blog has Cadence Design Negotiates With Buyout Firms.
This is all at the rumor stage, but it's interesting in what it says about EDA. Rather than being a high-growth industry where one might make several times investment by picking the right hot technology, this is more about lucrative cash flows coming from software maintenance agreements.
If private equity firms become players in our industry, how will this change them? Will it lead to "slash and burn" of R&D, just trying to milk the recurring revenue from existing products? But how could such an approach fund the R&D to keep pace with the changes and challenges following from Moore's Law?
Update: An EE Times blog posting on dynamics of the EDA business. And, a YouTube interview with Gary Smith and his DAC preview. EDA gets hip!
More Updates: Richard Goering weighs in.
Last year, I went to DAC in San Francisco, and I made a number of posts to my blog both before and after the 2006 conference:
This year, I'm not going to DAC in San Diego, but I thought I'd at least "phone it in" for my blog. With due credit to the EE Times' Richard Goering and other professional journalists, here's your one-stop 2007 DAC blog nexus:
I'm getting tired (so tired! --Bauhaus) of waiting on vendors who promise that all our problems with their product will be fixed in the next release!
I told an EDA vendor that waiting for their tool to improve reminded me of the play Waiting for Godot. I thought this quite clever, but they didn't seem to. Maybe they didn't have to read it in college?
It might be fun to cast EDA persons into the play. Who would play the roles?
Here's my literary interpretation:
Dear readers,
Off topic, though perhaps a reason for the decline in my posting frequency since the beginning of the year. For the past several months, I've been supporting a program that raises awareness and funds for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. This charity funds blood cancer research and patient services.
The program I'm part of is called Team in Training. Every season of every year, hundreds of runners, cyclists, and triathletes come together to train for a signature endurance event (e.g., marathon, century ride, or triathlon). More importantly, we collectively raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to help find a cure for cancer and to help those currently afflicted. We do this by getting sponsorship donations to the Society from our friends, families, and colleagues. Why not give blog readers a chance to help, too? That's where you come in. If your curiosity is piqued, and you'd like to read the rest of the story and perhaps make a donation to a very worth charity, please take a look at my Team in Training page. There you will find a link to another blog I've been keeping, "New Rider on the Purple Stage", which describes my cycling season in pictures and words. Please note that my season culminates in a few weeks, and the last day for donations for this season is May 21, 2007.
Thanks for reading.
John
