Startups to watch

This is an intriguing list of startups, though the selection criteria is rather mysterious. Reviewing it gives you a feel for what's coming and what's hot in our industry. I spotted a few EDA companies, several in the "DFM" space and at least one related to "ESL" design.

"editors have selected companies based on a mix of criteria including: technology, intended market, maturity, financial position and investment profile.

Startups on the Silicon 60 list include companies involved in semiconductor chips, memory, fab equipment, packaging, foundry, materials, MEMS and EDA software that made an impression on EE Times editors. They are emerging companies to watch for a wide variety of reasons.

EETimes.com - EE Times updates list of emerging startups

PS3 Prediction: Sailing Past Xbox 360 on a Sea of Red Ink

GameDaily BIZ: Sony's Game Division Expecting Massive Loss on PS3 Launch

UNDERclocking, anyone?

Those darn ATI chips are "hot", alright: Apple purposely slows MacBook graphics chip.

GPUs are just so huge. It's an "embarassingly parallel" application, so ATI & NVIDIA can just keep throwing more gates that the problem, following Moore's Law. The Holy Grail is to render cinematic quality in real time. We'll get there some day, but there will need to be lots of technology and methodology innovations to use power wisely.

Building up a `bump' in the new flat world

I attended an alumni event, Berkeley in Silicon Valley, earlier this week. It was at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, which is definitely worth a visit for the audience of this blog. Ah, the memories! They have all the early PCs, and really old mechanical or analog computers, slide rules, etc.

The featured speaker was Professor Richard Newton, Dean of the UC Berkeley College of Engineering (my alma mater). I was going to post a write-up of his talk, but Mike Langberg from the San Jose Mercury News already did a very professional job at MercuryNews.com | 04/13/2006 | Langberg: Building up a `bump' in the new flat world. So go read that!

Some comments/notes:

• Synthetic Biology is "the next big thing". Remember "Plastics" from the movie The Graduate? Well, this is like that for the next century.
• The questions from the audience were surprisingly pragmatic:
  1. How can we invest in Synthetic Biology? Prof. Newton didn't have specific opportunities. It's an extremely new and risky field, more "research" than "development" at this point. I wonder if Biotech mutual funds would cover this space? It seems like they would.
  2. What about the problem of H1B visas and how that will devalue US engineering careers? I don't think a university professor can really appreciate the anxiety that some engineers in industry feel. Professors see the newest, sexiest technologies and get to work with really interesting emerging companies. Personally, I've become less concerned with H1B than with "offshoring". At least the visa-holders bring their high skill levels and tax-paying ability into the US!
  3. With demographic changes in California, the questioner suggested that the future majority ethnic groups (i.e., Latinos)do not value education as highly, and does this pose a challenge to Prof. Newton's call to make the Bay Area a "bump in the flat world"? Wow, this seemed like a politically incorrect question, and the questioner must have had guts (or been oblivious) to ask it. Prof. Newton didn't cut him any slack, saying that he found the Latinos that he encounters in his work to be just as passionate about education as anyone else.

The State of 3D: Economics of 3D

The State of 3D: Economics of 3D is an excellent history of the graphics chip industry, i.e., NVIDIA vs. ATI, past, present, and future!

Furthermore, as you dig into the article, you can learn a lot about semiconductor economics, die size, binning, and the huge impact that design and fabrication issues can have on economics and business success.

An Awesome DATE Report

Peggy Aycinena has written a very detailed and well organized report on DATE, which is the European equivalent of DAC. Read it all here: EDACafe Weekly : DATE 2006: Between Gem�tlichkeit und Angst - March 13, 2006

Furthermore, she refers to the very impressive keynote address by Mentor Graphics' CEO:

** The keynote address delivered on Tuesday morning at DATE by Dr. Wally Rhines, Chairman and CEO at Mentor Graphics and Chair of the EDA Consortium (EDAC) was nothing short of a magnus opus. Rhines simply said it all - simply.

As an aside, I've never met Peggy, though I recognize her name as a long-time EDA analyst and commentator. This column was the first time I've seen her picture, and I can't help but be struck by her resemblence to Arianna Huffington! (And I mean this in a complimentary way.) Separated at birth? What do you think?

IT Jobs Migration: Fears vs. Reality :: AO

IT Jobs Migration: Fears vs. Reality :: AO is a thoughtful, even-handed review of the job dynamics of the Information Technology field. It refers to an in-depth report by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), "Globalization and Offshoring of Software".

I'd assume that the analysis of the IT field applies to the closely related engineering fields like hardware and software engineering. Let's hope that the conclusion is correct, that an open market benefits both developed and developing nations. I'm sure this is true on the macro level, but we must keep an eye on those directly affected by outsourcing -- do companies invest in "new business opportunities to generate more new job"?

RapidChip R.I.P.

Being modest, I hate to say "I told you so", but LSI scraps ASIC line, plans to sell DSP unit seems consistent with the doubts about RapidChip that I expressed in this post in July 2005. Is there a stampede for the doors? A pioneer in the field of "structured ASIC", Lightspeed Semiconductor, exited the market just last month.

Too bad, I was sort of longing for the simple days of yesteryear when we did Gate Arrays, and these products resembled re-warmed Gate (or Embedded) Arrays.

SystemVerilog, a better RTL

I'm looking forward to being able to use SystemVerilog for Design (synthesis). Looks like this effort is picking up according to EETimes.com - Vendors warm to SystemVerilog

I haven't done a thorough survey of the language, but a few of the things that will help Design/Synthesis are:

• Interfaces (objects that define ports (and even protocols) between designs)
• Explicit treatment of intent for case statements
• Explicit treatment of intent for always blocks

I'm sure there are many more. I look forward to trying it.

Is Synopsys undermining synthesis standardization? Gee, they'd never do that. ;-) Looked at from the perspective of protecting their franchise, they have the most to lose from making designs portable. We've the same types of battles over library standardization (finally, Liberty) and a synthesis subset for Verilog HDL.

The 9-in-1 Wonder Chip

I don't get all the hype about the IBM/Sony/Toshiba "Cell" chip: The 9-in-1 Wonder Chip - September 5, 2005

Sure, I can believe it's a very fast, efficient CPU, with provisions for multi-processing. But IBM is betting its whole computing future on it? And how could this be so revolutionarily different from anything that all the other genius CPU designers have come up with, including AMD and deep-pocketed Intel?

I don't get it, but I'd like to. What's so different?

Engineers' pay will fall

Talk about "tough love"! This letter to EE Times, Engineers' pay will fall, presents a reasoned analysis of the dynamics affecting an Engineer's career, particularly in the US.

He has a very concise analysis of the reasons that Law and Medicine seem to provide more lucrative, secure careers now that "The World is Flat".

He doesn't dump on engineering and say to never pursue it as a career, but you need to go into it with your eyes open and priorities straight.

Computer research due for course correction

Research due for course correction lists several research directions for computer design, including

• What's the right granularity for parallelism?
• 1,000 CPU multiprocessor reference system for academic research (RAMP)
• "CMOS killer" and CMOS rejuvenator technologies
• wireless convergence and management
• new software engineering approaches for higher productivity and quality

Fascinating, stimulating stuff. It will keep us engineers busy for a long time. :-)

Analysis & Solution of the American Engineering Crisis

OK, the post's title is grandiose, but it caught your attention. Humorous, satirical, but with a big grain of truth:

"Americans, it seems, have also grown too lazy to bother obtaining an electrical engineering or computer science degree.

How this surprises anyone is beyond me. You can float through four years of undergraduate classes sucking beer out of co-eds' navels, pick up your philosophy degree and then head to law school. Or, if you're one of those pathetic young Democrats, you can pretend to work hard at your politics classes, shoot a few rounds of golf for the school team and then whore yourself for millions in Washington. Less ambitious types can work hard enough in a grade inflation rich system to interest a Fortune 2000 company, flag down an MBA and then spend thirty or so years collecting a nice paycheck.

You'd have to be a real expletive to try and succeed in the difficult engineering and science classes"

America can lick the Asian peril by training Mexican smarties

Trends in semiconductor technology | Gabe on EDA

Trends in semiconductor technology | Gabe on EDA

Great summary by Gabe of an IBM talk on the big technical challenges to scaling CMOS further. Some of the points that caught my eye:

• silicon CMOS is viable for at least 10 years down to around 22 nm range
• Power & leakage management are essential
• next generations of CMOS will change to metal gate and high k dielectric materials. Hey, doesn't the "M" in CMOS stand for Metal, anyway? Why did we start using polysilicon gates and still call it CMOS? Should be CPOS!
• Yield variability is addressed in three categories: lot-lot, regional systematic, and local systematic. ... The real challenge is the local random variations. Because of the atomic scale of the devices, all effects are a function of small number statistics.

NVIDIA should acquire ...

And now, for a business interlude in this blog, What would Jen-Hsun Do?

Jen-Hsun Huang is the CEO of NVIDIA. In NVIDIA's last earnings conference call, management announced the intention to make more acquisitions. The article that I've linked to is a survey of the markets that NVIDIA competes in, and offers a theory as to which company NVIDIA should acquire. Interesting reading! Is he right? Check back in 2007.

One In Two PCs Won't Run Vista's 3D Interface

One In Two PCs Won't Run Vista's 3D Interface, i.e., those with integrated graphic controllers lack the 3D power for Microsoft's new OS user interface.

Sounds like a good omen for discrete GPU vendors like NVIDIA and ATI!

Geeksta rappers rhyme tech talk

EETimes.com - Geeksta rappers rhyme tech talk

This is funny! I must be in the 1 percent of 1 percent of the tech community that appreciates this stuff. Jump to page 3 if you want to get to the lyrics.

Panelists: ESL is promising but still needs work - 2/9/2006 - EDN

Panelists: ESL is promising but still needs work - 2/9/2006 - EDN is a nice survey of what some companies are doing for design above RTL abstraction.

The article acknowledges that the systemC flow has holes. It was interesting to read that people are translating RTL to SystemC. What do you call synthesis in reverse? Abstraction? It sort of makes sense if you get a huge simulation speedup, but robust synthesis and verification from SystemC to RTL would help productivity much more. That is still out in the future for the general case.

Digital designer's plight debated at ISSCC

EETimes.com - Digital designer's plight debated at ISSCC is just full of ideas on the future of careers in circuit and logic design.

I was surprised that there doesn't seem to be that large a market for digital circuit design, as "clever" techniques like domino logic prove to be too power-hungry.

There will be opportunities in mixed signal circuit design or for "those engaged in synthesis and place and route". That's fine by me, as the latter is my area of expertise.

U.S. designers still the best (for now), CEOs say

EETimes.com - U.S. designers still the best (for now), CEOs say is a thought-provoking survey of CEOs perspective.

Note the difference between quality and quantity, number of engineers vs. number of good engineers.

Also interesting is the comment that overseas engineers' salaries are catching up to the US. Good for them! (and for us!)