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I would like to discuss one of my favorite tools for field encounters - Discover-Y (pronounced “discovery” or “discover why”). It is a kind of preconfigured mind map, for use to quickly prepare any type of customer encounter. It is also a fantastic tool for use during the encounter itself, and afterwards, for debriefing and reporting.

One of the challenges ...

On the Tuesday of DAC I moderated a panel session on Hardware Assisted Verification in 10 Years: More Need, More Speed. Although this topic obviously could include FPGA-based prototyping, in fact we spent pretty much the whole time talking about emulation. Gary Smith, on Sunday night, actually set up things by pointing out that emulation is the heart of how ...

Yes, it’s a pleasant surprise; it is Virtual Fabrication Platform, one of the new innovations in 2013. I was looking around for what kind of breakthrough technologies will be announced in DAC this year. And here I came across this new kind of innovative tool which can produce final virtual fabricated 3D structures after following all the complex steps of actual fabrication process based ...

Mathias Silvant’s EdXact deals with the nasty stuff: All those parasitics that clutter post-layout netlists. In brief, Edxact’s mission is to reduce the effect of these parasitics on analysis runtimes without sacrificing precision.

Mathias and I are both exiles (he from Germany, me from the UK) living near Grenoble in France, and we have been there and known each other for a while. So when I asked him how his new venture was faring, he gently reminded me that Edxact is 9 years old now. Time ...

There is a lot of talk about the Internet of Things (IoT) about how everything is going to be connected to the internet. For some reason the archetypal example is a refrigerator that knows what you are nearly out of and puts it on your shopping list. Or orders it from the store. Or something. This seems like pretty ...

Just as a disciplined flow is crucial in design – you would not think of starting Place and Route before writing the RTL – a well-defined process is key to successful customer meetings. Have you ever come away from a meeting feeling:

• That your customer was much less enthusiastic than he or she should have been?
• That things did not really move forward?
• That

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With DAC approaching, it is a good time for both EDA companies and their customers to take a deeper look at the evaluation process of EDA tools, and how EDA companies position their tools. I hope this is useful for customers and vendors alike.

When it comes to positioning EDA tools in the marketplace there are really only three meaningful measurement ...

It goes without saying that registers play a vital role in designing any ASIC, FPGA, SoC or System. In today’s world, while designing SoC with multiple IPs and functionalities on the same chip, registers stay at the heart of the design right from the architectural level as they are used for key interfaces between hardware, software, firmware and even IPs. ...

Early in this week, I was reading news about Samsung announcing its breakthrough 5G mmWave technology. Well, this can bring fastest smart phone in the world which could enable several functions of day-to-day life and become revolutionary. The technology is not ready for commercial use, its building blocks seems to be working. There is an article by Ed Sutherland – Samsung unveils 5G mmWave ...