By Ed Sperling
Cadence’s Richard Goering examines the high stakes at new process nodes, where investment throughout the supply chain is exploding. Forget about bonuses for the foreseeable future. Goering also follows the Si2 Conference’s focus on low-power standards, most notably interoperability between competing power formats.

Synopsys’ Navraj Nandra looks at 28nm chips in volume production and what still needs to be done—scaling analog/mixed signal and meeting higher voltage compliance requirements. It doesn’t get any easier from here, either.

Mentor’s Colin Walls pays homage to another luminary who just passed away—Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the C programming language. His legacy is pervasive.

Speaking of C, a language dispute has erupted in John Cooley’s DeepChip, this one over C/C++ and SystemC. There are no clear answers, but there is a lot of history to wade through.

Synopsys’ Allen Watson looks back on the PC era and what’s replacing it. You probably have one example in your pocket—or in your wall charger. There are some videos to go along with this, as well, which you probably can access from your mobile device if you can actually see the screen.

Si2’s Steve Schulz looks at the enormous value of GlobalFoundries’ contribution of DRC+ data structures to Si2. Think of it as an open standard that will be integrated into another open standard—OpenDFM. s/

Cadence’s Jason Andrews unleashes part four of his epic about how to use a UART in virtual platforms—this one focused on capturing logging information about a running system.

Mentor’s Robin Bornoff examines the concept of “rubbish in, rubbish out,” as it applies to thermal IC package models and concludes that all thermal models are wrong–maybe.

Synopsys’ Tom De Schutter, writing in TLM Central, compares scale-car models with transaction-level models. The parallels are interesting, even though you can’t drive either of them.

And in case you missed the most recent issue of the System-Level Design newsletter, here are some standout blogs worth reading:

–Mentor’s Jon McDonald has some revelations about ESL while driving in Italy.

–Cadence’s Frank Schirrmeister puts Kurzwell’s Singularity to the mobile test.

–Synopsys’ Achim Nohl looks at early software development and the supply chain.

–Sonics’ Steve Hamilton questions why there isn’t more interest in eDRAM—and why it’s misunderstood.

–And Arteris’ Kurt Shuler give an interesting retrospective on Steve Jobs.

Tags: Arteris, Cadence, DeepChip, Mentor Graphics, Si2, Sonics, Synopsys

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 26th, 2011 at 8:50 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.