Blog Review: July 22
By Ed Sperling
DAC is upon us. The number of bloggers has risen exponentially. What was an inconsistent trickle is now a flood.
Even the individual bloggers are producing more. Mentor’s Thomas Bollaert wins the award for most blogs produced during a three-day period (four), including a two-part blog on synthesizing parallel designs from sequential C++. He’s quite good at it and he really does have something to say, but this is also quite a bit to digest.
Synopsys’ Juergen Jaeger talks about what it’s like to be dis-invited from a Cadence-sponsored design verification club. Take note, all you folks who say there’s no ill will between the OVM and VMM camps. At what level?
And Cadence’s Jason Andrews talks about the role of embedded software in low-power design. This is a good read, and despite some really good competition this week, Jason gets our blog of the week award. This is a hot topic, so to speak, and it deserves all the attention it can get.
Speaking of good competition, Harry Gries’ blog on Oasys’ claims about Synopsys’s synthesis tools is a must read. It’s great information tempered by a healthy dose of cynicism.
Mentor’s Ralph Zach looks at SoC emulation vs. prototyping and, unlike some other folks we’ve heard about recently, states his biases up front. Good job, Ralph. We even like your explanation of the differences between emulation and prototyping.
Gabe Moretti digs a little deeper on this issue of who’s blogging and why. It’s a solid piece of analysis from someone who knows the EDA world extremely well—and it shows.
Only engineers get excited about USB pictures—or at least they’re the only ones who are willing to admit to it. Synopsys’ Eric Huang gets our nod for ferreting out a photo of what to most people would look like just, well, a USB port. The truth, however, is it’s really a USB 3.0 port.
Mentor’s Don Kurelich questions whether systems engineers are right in assuming that hardware is commoditized and the future is software. Our request: Bring a recorder to the next session. We want to listen in on this one.
Synopsys’ Godwin Maben is back after a hiatus with some insights about a level-shifter insertion rule in UPF. Technical, but very insightful.
And Team Specman, one of the regular contributors to the blogosphere, talks about TLM-driven design and verification. These folks definitely know their audience.
Along similar lines, sort of, JL Gray talks about why there is absolutely no compelling reason to ever use ovm_transaction. He’s looking for people to challenge him. Any takers?
Unnamed sources questioned our literary license about who’s going to buy what based on John Cooley’s blog last week. Cooley wrote that mainstream designers are looking at C synthesis for the first time. And we agree, that is an interesting development.
Tags: Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys