The article itself is good. It does a nice job of explaining GPUs and CPUs in laymen's terms. There were only a couple spots where I thought "what on earth are they talking about?" And, their highlights of the company's history and CEO are well done.
Check it out. It's nice to see one of our companies lauded in the mainstream media!
Update: Added Magma link.
Ms. Sramana Mitra has posted a series of articles with her commentary on how EDA vendors look financially. Take a look at her posts on
May you all have a restful year in and wishing all peace and prosperity in 2008.
John
Whoever said EDA is boring? From a technical innovation standpoint, it is pretty exciting. From a financial standpoint, not so much. :-)
EDN Hot 100 Products of 2007: EDA - 12/14/2007 - EDN: "EDN's editors offer up their annual list of the year's 100 most significant ICs, components, buses, boards, EDA tools, power devices, test instruments, and more."
I've worked with a couple of these, and plan to learn more about the others.
Along the same lines, Fairchild, the first big semiconductor company and training ground for countless startup founders, recently celebrated its 50th birthday.
I've often thought that if you really, really grokked the transistor, you'd be all set to contribute to large swaths of electrical engineering. I'm certainly not as facile with all its behaviors as I'd like. How long would it take to really understand, thoroughly and intuitively? A year? Four years? A career?
What I especially love is that as I write this, I am sporting a beard and am wearing a red plaid flannel shirt! If I just would let my hair go wild, perhaps my scripting will improve.
Anyone know details of what's happening at Cadence? I wonder how other EDA vendors faring with projects and hiring?
This video itself is inspired by this excellent video of Billy Joel's song.
But this may not be the best moment to invest financially in China, as their stock market looks like a bubble waiting to pop: China: First BRIC To Crumble?
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!
Check out the rest of Niniane's Blog, too. She writes with great openness and gives insight into life at Silicon Valley->Web 2.0->Google.
The secret sauce in their 45 nm recipe is "HK+MG", for High-K dielectric and Metal Gate. Cool stuff, this High-K addresses the huge problem of gate leakage as the process scales down. The power reduction claims are very impressive.
One nit that's always bothered me is that we all design in CMOS, and the "M" in CMOS stands for Metal. But the gate hasn't been metal in ages! Now it is metal again and it's a novelty. What is old is now new again.
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:
