By Ed Sperling

There’s a crisis brewing for Steve Collis’ family, and it’s all because they can’t remember to charge their cell phones. It’s preventing Collis from getting a good night of sleep, which is threatening the long-term health of his employer, Mentor Graphics, portable electronics in general, and possibly the entire globe. This is very bad. The solution, strangely, appears to be in SoC architectural design.

Synopsys’ Cary Chin looks at the hidden message in the iPad. The secret is in customizable cores, low power and what this will mean for electronics design. It’s a great look at what’s changing behind all the hype.

Inveterate blogger Daniel Nenni takes a dive into the make-vs.-buy economics of outsourced IP. It’s an intelligent discussion of a topic that should be on the minds of all SoC developers, even ones working at older nodes. This is a must-read analysis piece.

Team Specman debunks rumors that Cadence doesn’t plan to continue investing in e. There’s a link to an interview embedded in this blog, but the bigger question is where are these rumors coming from?

Mentor’s Colin Walls looks at the difference between a software development platform and an operating system and where Android fits in. In case anyone hasn’t noticed, the OS is far less interesting these days than what’s above it—and it may lose its meaning altogether someday.

Synopsys’ Frank Schirrmeister takes us deeper into chip design meets the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and what ESL has done to the design industry. How much science fiction can you cram onto a piece of silicon and does it double with each new blog?

Mentor’s Thomas Bollaert peels back the cover on an interesting new problem: application-specific designs. When is a system time-invariant? What happens when everything starts competing for resources in multicore implementations? We’re about to find out.

Doulos’ John Aynsley takes a look at how to handle incoming transactions from multiple sources using VMM. This is deep in the verification weeds, and if you’re using this methodology you probably want to read this.

And if you’re in the OVM camp, still in denial that VMM really exists, here’s a pep talk from Cadence’s Tom Anderson. No wonder Evan Bayh isn’t running for re-election.

Tags: Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 9:34 am and is filed under News Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.