Blog Review: Dec. 16
By Ed Sperling
Verification, verification and more verification. Well, at least they’re not writing poems about it yet.
Mentor’s John Ferguson takes issue with a former customer’s commentary in John Cooley’s DeepChip about dumping Mentor’s Calibre in favor of Magma Quartz. Ferguson says the customer declined to renew its 2000 license, which expired in 2001, rendering any comparison moot. That’s a fair argument, although in Cooley’s defense it’s not as if he would have access to that kind of customer information. Still, you’ve got to figure this one really rankled someone at Mentor because it took some serious determination to ferret out nine-year-old customer data. It’s like a scene out of an old Humphrey Bogart movie where he slaps some two-bit thug and growls, “You’ll take it and like it.”
Ferguson must have been having lunch with Harry Foster, also at Mentor, who’s raising questions about the source of a quote in an EDA DesignLine blog that was attributed to him. In this case the quote was right—he said it—but the timing was wrong. And there’s more to it. Foster says it doesn’t capture the whole subject, which he goes on to explain.
The OpenSource version of VMM 1.2 has finally been released, and Synopsys’ Janick Bergeron is the right person to fill you in on the details. But here are some tidbits: It includes implicit hierarchical phasing, support for an alternative to TLM 2.0, an object hierarchy and a class factory API.
Just down the road a piece, Cadence’s Jason Andrews digs even deeper into Android system verification in part four of his epic that will stand up against any miniseries on television (which you’ll be able to run in a window while reading this blog to make a real-time comparison).
Mentor’s Dennis Brophy, responds to some questions from blogger Brian Bailey about the IEEE EDA User group, with an off-handed reference to zombies. Well, he says it’s a joke, but there’s also a reference that this EDA User group is closed. It makes you wonder about these guys. And just for the record, define zombie.
Mimasic’s Bhanu Kapoor talks about the importance of methodology in SoC power management verification. He has a point. Power management applied after the fact causes some nasty problems that leaves some of the best verification engineers using words you never thought they’d use.
Mentor’s Colin Walls takes a look at the Agile method of software development and why it should be applied to embedded devices. It’s a good idea. And for anyone requiring further reading on the Agile method, check out the Wikipedia description.
Synopsys’ Cary Chin talks about how fast he can drive to LA and back and why that’s not average. This is a great explanation of why mileage may vary, even in cell phones.
Mentor’s Arvind Narayanan looks at the old and new breed of clock designers and what they contribute to the power budget—as well as the kind of personal artifacts that identify them. This is a very well written blog with some good tidbits tossed in. Kudos, Mr. Narayanan.
Tags: Cadence, Magma, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys