Synopsys’ Tom Borgstrom takes the mystery out of elevator pitches for semiconductor designs, creating the formula and the metrics that work every time. One question he didn’t address, though: Do elevator pitches need to be shorter in earthquake-prone areas like California because the buildings aren’t as high?

Andrew Piziali, an independent consultant, takes a look at the unintelligible jargon created by the chip architect and how the terminology is misconstrued further down the line by the verification engineer. He’s right about the miscommunication, but we’re still confused about what a conflabulator is. Our body of experts concluded it’s some type of gym equipment.

Mentor’s Thomas Bollaert used his blog this week as a forum for a Q&A with an end user from TI. This is good information about designing IP for a set-top box with Catapult C. Looks to us like a battle is brewing with all the big guys over high-level synthesis and the ease of converting floating point to fixed point.

Bhanu Kapoor goes hunting for TLM 2.0 and System Verilog verification methodologies and comes up with a mouthful of fresh meat. For anyone looking for real details and insight about this topic, you’ve come to the right place.

Si2’s Sumit Dasgupta takes a reality check on 3D design—and comes up with a list of what’s missing to actually turn this from the idea stage into products.

In the area of low-power design, a panel of experts talks about the need to broaden the low-power discussion. The dialog was intelligently analyzed and recorded by Richard Goering, as you might expect from his long history in this industry.

Also in the low-power area, Jack Erickson looks at how to save power without just shutting down all the blocks. Sometimes you can’t just turn everything off.

Mentor’s Colin Walls talks about why companies should stick to their knitting—or at least their core competencies. That helps explain why Ford didn’t make its own paint. And why should hardware designers write operating systems, protocol stacks and graphics? Good question.

And finally, Synopsys’ Navraj Nandra talks about implementing PCI Express in MicroTCA, the telecommunications chassis standard. It’s about time some of these standardized interconnects made their way into the telecom world.

Tags: Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Mimasic, Si2, Synopsys, synthesis, TLM 2.0, Verification

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