Blog Review: Jan. 21
By Ed Sperling
In case you’re wondering why the weekly blog review is a day late, blame the weather in Silicon Valley. Electronic distribution requires electricity, and yesterday we had none.
Synopsys’ Frank Schirrmeister has discovered a missing link between a Pink Floyd song and system-level design. Or more accurately, he found eight links—reasons why companies will hit a brick wall if they don’t adopt ESL. He even illustrated it with a great piece of sculpture. Was that photo taken from the Synopsys parking lot?
Mentor’s Colin Walls takes yet another look at the Agile software development method and how it can be applied to hardware. Central to this whole approach is something known as Scrum, which is the shortened version of the rugby term scrummage. The Scrum method has nothing to do with rugby, and so far the Agile methodology has nothing to do with hardware. But it could.
Peace seems to be on the minds of at least some of the folks at Accellera. They’re working on a new universal verification methodology. Synopsys’ Karen Bartleson seems to have called this one right. You never know who’s listening in these days.
But it’s questionable exactly what will be in that new standard. Check out the blog from Mentor’s Dennis Brophy, who talks about an exit strategy for VMM while everyone migrates to OVM. Interesting idea, but it may be a tough sell to Synopsys and their customers.
Harry Gries, AKA the ASIC guy, drills into the effect of services companies on the EDA industry. If SoCs become a commodity, will the differentiation be in algorithms and system-level design? This is an interesting discussion, given the steady growth of companies like eSilicon, Open-Silicon and Global Unichip.
And in the foundry business, it’s now TSMC vs. GlobalFoundries. Who’s going to win? Probably the fabless companies, as long as this war is raging. Competition is always a good thing. Check out Daniel Nenni’s blog on the hostilities and what it means to mere mortals.
Mimasic’s Bhanu Kapoor peels back the covers on formal verification and why it’s essential in low-power implementations. Where did this guy learn all of this stuff?
Synopsys’ Navraj Nandra writes about PCI Express and the making of the blockbuster movie Avatar. They don’t actually go together, but they could have. Our guess is PCI Express ultimately will make more money than Avatar even though most people will never even know it’s there. But they will know when it stops working.
Design rule checking is no longer a simple affair, once you add in third-party IP. Mentor’s Michael White looks at DRC waivers and their effect on verification. It’s not a pretty picture.
Having trouble with transactor interfaces? If you’re using, or considering, VMM 1.2, this is required reading. There’s lots of information here from Synopsys’ Vidyashankar Ramaswamy.
And in case you’ve been following the miniseries on Android System Verification from Cadence’s Jason Andrews, he’s up to part 6. The plot thickens.
Tags: Cadence, eSilicon, Global Unichip, Mentor Graphics, Open Silicon, Synopsys, TSMC