By Ed Sperling

It was a slow week for blogging. Maybe it was the Fourth of July weekend in the United States. Maybe it’s the mad scramble before DAC. Or maybe people decided to go to the beach and forget about regression testing and parasitics.

Not so for Colin Walls at Mentor, who presumably was vacationing in a small Cornish village—Cornwall isn’t exactly a mecca for electronics, after all—and pondering the user interface on his phone. It’s interesting when the only connection back to this world is what you helped create, and it doesn’t work as well as it could.

In the same vain, sort of, Mentor’s John Perry compares tennis at Wimbledon to mechanical analysis. Well, it’s good to see these folks are looking outside for ideas. This puts a whole new perspective on the meaning of respin.

Nasib Naser at Synopsys looked at how to link a SystemC model to verification. This is the first stab we’ve seen at this, and it’s a good one, but it probably could turn into a series of books. Modeling is essential at advanced process nodes to allow flexibility in the design—something that will become quite obvious at the first respin—but it’s also going to become a requirement even at older nodes because it can shave time off the design process.

Consultant Bhanu Kapoor’s blog on methods associated with data generation in verification is excellent. This is deep technology with great examples, and there needs to be a lot more of this kind of writing because everyone is encountering a variety of new problems at advanced nodes.

e/Specman has a new blog, this one by Sandeep Gor. It’s technical and meaty, and if you live and breathe in this world, here’s an additional resource.

DAC is coming. There’s no question about that. More and more blogs are pointing to this year’s agenda. Synopsys’ Karen Bartleson does a nice job of putting some of the important pieces in one place.

Harry Gries, aka the ASIC guy, has a recording of himself singing this week, interspersed with some other stuff about DAC. Suffice it to say that we appreciate Harry mostly for his writing and his technology and industry insights.

Finally, don’t just take our word for who’s doing the right stuff with their blog. There’s a contest being held by Denali over who’s the best blogger in EDA. You may wonder where these names came from and why some companies were ignored. We certainly did. And not all of these bloggers are necessarily consistent about delivering new blogs. Nevertheless, here’s a look at their review.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 10:54 am and is filed under News Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.