Blog Review: May 9
By Ed Sperling
Mentor’s Mike Jensen looks at the “Rooster Tail,” the giant fan of water released out of three dams in the Pacific Northwest. Check out the photos and you’ll know why they call it the Rooster Tail. This would certainly be a rude awakening in the morning.
Synopsys’ Navraj Nandra examines whether DDR3L will ever make its way into mobile DRAM. The answer, apparently, is no.
Cadence’s Richard Goering peers into the details of 20nm RTL to GDSII methodology. This is like looking over Niagara Falls where manufacturability, timing variability and design size and complexity are churning at the bottom. Better reinforce the barrel.
DeepChip’s John Cooley focuses in on the changes on Mentor’s board of directors, notably that two of Carl Icahn’s three choices for the board have been replaced. This gives new meaning to hot swapping.
NXP engineer Chris Hill, standing in for Mentor’s Robin Bornoff, looks at diminishing returns in thermal design of PCBs and how extra copper layers don’t always help. Given the price of copper these days, no one will argue.
Independent blogger Gaurav Jalan examines the list of challenges for verification teams, providing some insight into why it takes so long to get a chip out the door. Even more disturbing, though, is that confidence in the final product appears to be on the wane.
Synopsys’ Eric Huang had one of those “ah-hah” moments about the limits of family involvement in technical subjects. You do what for a living? Is that legal?
Cadence’s Jason Andrews looks at simulation performance on a Zynq virtual platform using VirtualBox compared with native Linux.
Si2’s Steve Schulz previews what his group is doing at DAC this year, which will include a rundown of all the standards efforts under way at the moment—or at least the ones they’re talking about in public.
Mentor’s Brooks Moses looks at the embedded software in a control cluster of an unmanned aircraft and how difficult it is to program to get maximum performance. In this case, “maximum performance” may mean different things to different people.
Tags: Cadence, DeepChip, Mentor Graphics, NXP, Si2, Synopsys, Xilinx