By Ed Sperling
Synopsys’ Karen Bartleson points to an important—and prematurely short—video from Colin Warwick, a signal integrity expert at Agilent. It’s required watching for anyone working in the SoC tools world—not to mention anyone attending DesignCon this week.

Mentor’s Thomas Bollaert looks at the impact of corporate cultures at Apple and Samsung and what happens when you add automated tools into the process. It’s an interesting idea, and one that deserves much more attention.

Apple seems to be on a lot of people’s mind this week. Cadence’s Jack Erickson looks at what went into Apple’s iPad. Details of this device keep leaking out, which is only fueling the interest over the iPad itself.

Daniel Nenni advocates a close partnership between EDA, foundries and IP providers at 28nm and beyond. He’s right on the need, but it doesn’t appear that all the players view themselves on an equal playing field.

Apparently not everyone sees the foundries equally, either. John Cooley’s blog looks at TSMC yield issues at 40nm. Are they real? It depends whom you ask and when you ask them.

Can there ever be a simple solution for mixing analog and digital on the same chip? Synopsys’ Navraj Nandra tackles that question with a look back at Henry Ford’s famous saying, “Any customer can have a car painted any color so long as it is black.” For anyone who’s been to Berkeley, Cheese Board Collective’s pizza seems to have followed Henry Ford’s model with a single flavor each day. It doesn’t seem to work in system-level design, though, where priorities are sometimes incompatible.

Mentor’s Colin Walls peels back the covers on one of the best-kept secrets in software programming—most of the time is spent in maintaining code, not in writing it. It’s a great look at why code needs to be written extremely clearly.

Cadence’s Steven Brown examines the entry points for companies using transaction-level modeling, which is a basic building block of ESL, and what are the likely phases for widespread adoption—in great detail. It’s an interesting perspective.

Synopsys’ Frank Schirrmeister looks back on a decade of technology change and the looming war clouds in 2000 between SystemC and System Verilog. Has much changed? Well, not really, but at least no one is calling it a war anymore. Who has time?

Mentor’s Steve Collis has discovered a major flaw in a device that was designed to monitor energy usage. Its batteries don’t last very long. So much for low-power engineering.

And finally, there seems to be an interesting crossover underway between blogging and cartoons. Check out this week’s entry from Synopsys’ Srivatsa Vasudevan. He may be onto something.

Tags: agilent, Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, TLM

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