Survival Skills For Engineers
By Ed Sperling
Santa Clara, CA – User groups are typically good for figuring out the pain points for engineers, but this year’s Mentor Graphics User2User conference was as much about survival skills as it was pain points.
Terry Fox, signal integrity consultant at Terry Fox & Associates, advised engineers working in the high-speed design world to speak in terms that “bean counters can understand.”
“There are two things that bean counters understand,” he said. “Cost and risk. And it’s very dangerous when they think they understand engineering.”
He also said all designs need to leave room for errors in their noise and power budgets and advised engineers that there really are “designs from hell” where nothing will ever work right. One way around that is to make sure that in the pre-layout design review there actually is a layout person. But he said noted that the process must budget enough slack for inaccuracies within that process.
One recurring theme throughout the conference was access to information in a central place. Fox said there needs to be a single location for all critical information in a design. At the board level, Chad Hawkinson, vice president of vertical marketing at PTC, said the missing piece of the puzzle is communication among various engineering groups so that incremental decisions along the way between the MCAD and ECAD teams are effectively communicated.
“The result is less problems toward the end of the process,” he said.
Lack of communication has dogged all aspects of system-level design for years. Cadence’s Open Access database was created in part to create a better method for sharing tools and IP, and partly to improve communication across various groups. That has become particularly important as designs include more software development up front, as various pieces of the entire design become compressed and begin overlapping, and as teams are spread out around the globe.
While all of this is useful information, survival skills may say something about an industry under pressure. It’s no longer just technical information and how-to engineering content, and either the presenters are under pressure or they’re hearing a lot more feedback from engineers about what they’re encountering in the field.
Tags: Architectural, business, EDA, ESL, Mixed Signal, Verification