By Ed Sperling
System-Level Design sat down to discuss the Internet of Things with Jack Guedj, president and CEO of Tensilica; John Heinlein, vice president of marketing for the physical IP division of ARM; Kamran Izadi, director of sourcing and supplier management at Cisco; and Oleg Logvinov, director of market development for STMicroelectronics’ Industrial and Power Conversion Division. What follows are excerpts of that conversation, which was held in front of a live audience at the recent GSA Silicon Summit.

SLD: Who’s responsible when something goes wrong on the Internet of Things?
Logvinov: It will hinge on business models, and it depends on how business models evolve. One size doesn’t fit all. Smart-home applications are being pushed very heavily by service providers. But in Europe, where consumers want to push this market forward, they don’t want to give much data to service providers. So it depends on the market, on specific products, and on the service. The models will evolve.
Izadi: Ultimately, the buck should stop with the service provider who provides a service to the end customer. But they need to work with their partners to make sure it’s seamless, because you can have three or four levels down. That’s when things get complex. A lot will go back to having predictability in the system to get those alerts and solve them in a timely fashion.

SLD: This is the downside of 50 billion things on the Internet, right? With one thing, you know who to point to. With 50 billion, you don’t.
Guedj: There are going to be some throwaway devices. If something doesn’t work and it’s really low-cost, people will replace it. The expensive stuff has to be covered by some service. The power companies can benefit from smart grid, which we talked about earlier, and that’s one application that is being deployed because there’s so much at stake there. They have to have a way to solve problems.

SLD: The darker side of this is security. What happens if your drive by wire automobile is hacked?
Guedj: The industry will benefit from that. Someone could argue they missed a meeting involving a $10 billion deal because they got the wrong directions.
Heinlein: It’s going to be a progressive rollout. While self-driving cars are interesting, they’re still some time away. The applications we talked about are not mission-critical. They’re life-improving. But progressively we’ll get better and better at this and security will evolve to do more mission-critical things.
Logvinov: We see a little bit of that today. If you think about the ‘bring your own device’ model for smart phones, who’s responsible for service working? It’s a collaboration between the user and the service provider. To enable that you need a secure container on your phone to isolate your enterprise data from your personal libraries and applications. Some of that is already happening today. As we move forward, we’ll see more and more of that. Essentially, when we start talking about the Internet of Things, it is essentially ‘bring your own device.’ We will be responsible for making purchasing decision about whether to acquire some gadget, and we also will want to expose this gadget to many services. It will be a collaboration between the user and one or more service providers.
Guedj: There will be hierarchical levels where the network may be on infrastructure on top, and the target devices with service providers enabling and controlling local devices.
Izadi: Different levels of aggregation makes a lot of sense. When it comes to safety and mission-critical, having redundancy and fail-over in case something happens are critical. Those are in place today with some of these applications. Failures happen. How do you deal with it?
Heinlein: There’s also the issue of WAN versus wired networks. From a home services aspect, homes are becoming more and more wired—not as much in the U.S. as in other countries, even though that’s the trend—and that’s the gateway to manageability. The local gateway could become the hub of controlling, configuring and debugging the local services. But it’s also the aggregator that goes into the networks.

SLD: How much of the Internet of Things is local versus cloud-based, or something in between?
Guedj: You could not afford to disrupt the network for a very tiny request, so you probably want some aggregation to use the network efficiently, no matter how large the bandwidth will be. But in terms of drawing a line in the sand, there isn’t a hard line. If you’re roaming, sometimes voice recognition works and sometimes it doesn’t. You need some local intelligence. There are clearly things that fall in the cloud, such as aggregation of data, databases and such. There are things that are in the target device, too, such as sensors. And then there are things that are fluid. If you’re doing voice recognition, you may be able to do it in the cloud if you have a very good connection. If you don’t, then you have local parsing. It takes more power and drains your battery, but you have constant quality of service regardless of where you are.
Izadi: Privacy concerns will drive the dial back and forth. We talked about profiling energy use and using this information to determine what can be optimized. One person from the audience stood up and said it’s impossible in his mind to allow a utility to know his energy consumption pattern, because that’s too revealing about his personal life. He would prefer this information be available to him, but confined to his home. This is a cultural issue, and privacy concerns stem from cultural issues.

SLD: When you think about the Internet of Things, and many different things, how much of this IP will be re-usable?
Guedj: The hard-wired technology is very efficient, but not very reusable. The more programmable things you have, the more you can re-use. The challenge in the low-end devices is smart programmability, so you can have programmability in a very efficient manner. The industry needs to strive to have those kinds of building blocks you can optimize solutions on. Otherwise it’s too diverse. But you can’t have one recipe for everything.
Heinlein: If you look at these applications, they’re going to be very different, with different price points, power points, and battery lifetime. Some can harvest, others can’t. It’s going to be a very vibrant time. There will be some things that can be built today using off-the-shelf MCUs and so on, but over time you’ll see more diversity, innovation, and squeezing cost out. The innovation is going to be exciting.
Izadi: From an OEM perspective, this is going to be huge. We’re taking the same equipment, ruggedizing it, and trying to connect it whether it’s the Internet of Things or your home. That means the semiconductors have to support industrial modes, work in a wider range of operating modes. How do you design for that up front?
Heinlein: We see more diversity, not less diversity at this end of the spectrum. In the middle, in the network infrastructure, there’s going to be a need to consume data at the end points of the cloud. That’s where we’ll see low-power servers. But in the embedded market, there’s more diversity, not less.
Logvinov: Hardware ruggedization and adaptability will be important, but we also have to look at the software side. If you take home gateways, for example, how can you make a device in such a way that it can last several years and be adaptable to new services? One of the approaches the industry is looking at today is an OGI (Open Government Initiative) platform where you can implement services as you go and fill them as you need to and create new ones as you need to. The software side of things also will affect the usability of platforms.

SLD: What’s the biggest potential limiter of the Internet of Things? What can slow it down?
Guedj: The diversity and the complexity, but what happen first is the service providers seeing a way to save money or make money and then being willing to sponsor those efforts. In those areas you need a clear business model from the service providers. That’s what’s been missing for consumer electronics. They’ve been searching for an AT&T or Verizon to sponsor the cost of the TV. That’s what’s going to drive the industry first.
Logvinov: It won’t slow down. The train has left the station. It’s moving. The only limiting factor is the speed of innovation. It’s growing and it will find its market
incarnation in smart homes, smart cities, smart campuses. It’s everywhere.

By Ed Sperling
System-Level Design sat down to discuss the Internet of Things with Jack Guedj, president and CEO of Tensilica; John Heinlein, vice president of marketing for the physical IP division of ARM; Kamran Izadi, director of sourcing and supplier management at Cisco; and Oleg Logvinov, director of market development for STMicroelectronics’ Industrial and Power Conversion Division. What follows are excerpts of that conversation, which was held in front of a live audience at the recent GSA Silicon Summit.

SLD: Considering much of the Internet of Things will involve older process geometries, what will differentiate one chipmaker from another? What will constitute a winning strategy?
Guedj: In any industry where things are still being defined, you need to move fast. You need to have an ability to grab things and put products together very quickly, adapt them and change them very quickly. You can do all the studies you want, but at some point things will change and you need to adapt. That affects the ecosystem, whether it’s software or hardware, because not everything will be programmable. You need to make changes according to how people are using the products and the market. Time to market and rapid evolution are key.

SLD: But this also will be a very long-term play, right? The Internet of Things is a unifying force for lots of markets, from cars to medical devices.
Heinlein: If you think about your connection to the Internet, you have a very low tolerance for pain on that. You will have an even lower tolerance here. So you’ll probably see a multiple-layered approach. First, you have more fixed infrastructure and commercial installations. That includes things like smart streetlights for energy savings that auto dim when there are no cars on the road. As we get good at that, and get local-area networks and personal-area networks solved, it will go more and more into the home and the personal space. You’ll get innovation at all these levels. Networking, including self-assembling networks, will be critical to this.
Izadi: Networking is going to be the platform. Customers are not interested in buying a box and paying for that box up front. They want to turn on services as they go. The semiconductor hardware players have to get used to that model. You don’t get paid for that piece of silicon right away. That’s going to be the challenge. How do you manage that business model and still make it successful.
Logvinov: We’ve been talking about the smart home for six or seven decades. It still isn’t successful yet. In today’s environment, it’s being talked about again. Why? Because we need these services. We need new ways to manage and interact with newly appearing electric cars and many other things that enter our home. If you talk about success in that environment, it relies on the ability to provide a pre-integrated platform for the ecosystem. Whether this platform is at the silicon level, software level, or a hardware box, it all needs to come together. The timelines and development cycles are very compressed. You need very short time to market enabled by platforms.

SLD: Will the Internet of Things be a driver for a platform strategy?
Heinlein: There are a couple different issues. Different applications will require different metrologies. Maybe you want partitioning, motion or protection from humidity. You want plug-and-play solutions so you don’t have to do custom chips for everything. And if this becomes pervasive, there is an issue about how much data gets created. So you need to do more and more local processing and filtering. ST has a sensor that does multiple different things together. That sensor could do a lot of filtering so the traffic that gets sent up to the network is much more efficient. The sensors adapt to their application so they don’t overload the network.
Guedj: We were talking about the smart home, but we also have to think about how smart we want our home to be. There is a question of how the consumer will feel about their body being controlled by the Internet. There may be some models that work and some models where consumers push back. And there may be some levels of assurance for the consumer that we will not stop their pacemaker remotely or force them to drive into a tree. You can’t afford to have everything programmable. You need a mix. And you need to re-use as much as possible into a bigger subsystem. That will be the challenge.
Heinlein: This goes into packaging, and you’re going to see heterogeneity in terms of the sensors. They could very well be in different process technologies.

SLD: You’re talking about 2.5D and 3D stacked die?
Heinlein: Yes. That’s pretty expensive now, but conceptually that kind of technology is valuable. And there’s also the question of whether it’s battery-powered or energy harvesting. It’s all of the above. But when you can buy a thing at the store, put it on the wall, and five years later the sticker turns red and you pull it off and buy another sticker—that’s the level of integration we need to get to.
Izadi: One of the very significant drivers of architectures and how they will be implemented is security. And it’s not just security in what we think about today. It’s security in the sense of unified platforms that can cater information to multiple consumers. Now, the question is how we separate those domains. How do we make sure a pacemaker is not affected—or a car is not affected—by someone trying to hack into your music library? We need to make sure that while we have a single source of information, there are silos—and those silos are separated so there is no danger of intrusion.
Logvinov: It’s not just intrusion. The system can fail.
Izadi: Yes. The system has to be resilient enough to self-recover.
Logvinov: Reliability, security, the integration of all these pieces—those are critical. What’s also required is some sort of a push toward standardization so these pieces can work together seamlessly. How that standardization will come together has yet to be seen, but I could envision an open-source type of development where people could develop software or pieces of IP, and they could share it. That could evolve into an open-source development structure where a lot more people are involved versus a close ecosystem of companies.

SLD: What becomes the basis of that standardization? Is it the hardware, the software?
Logvinov: It’s everywhere. If you look at what’s been standardized, everything that’s been standardized today is under scrutiny for whether it should be standardized. Open source provides a great platform and it’s a wonderful way to create rapid development, but at the same time what do we do with security concerns?
Heinlein: We have an initiative called Linaro that focuses on middleware. How do we take the middleware that you need and get it done more quickly. That’s a case where open source has been successful. When it comes to security, there may need to be an initiative to keep things safe. There’s going to have to be a balance. But for standardization, networking is going to be a key challenge. There are a few standards. IPv6 is going to be an issue, rather than only focusing on IPv4.

SLD: One of the challenges of standards also is that you don’t want to implement them too early. As you get standards things progress faster, but standards also can create problems as witnessed by the CPF-UPF issues.
Guedj: Standards will evolve, but there is a challenge because of the diversity. People solving one problem are not going to standardize with a totally different application. We need some intelligence to buffer that. The standards will evolve, and hopefully you won’t need to re-do everything.
Izadi: That’s why the programmability piece is important in the devices, so as the standards mature you can program them in. We’ve seen that in cable. The standards can be programmed into the field remotely without having to change the hardware infrastructure.
Logvinov: The ability to evolve standards is very important. But as an industry, we also have to be cognizant of a different problem. There are more and more standards bodies. If you’d like to implement something, here’s a standard from Standards Body A, another from Standards Body B, and another from Standards Body C. This is something we need to deal with as an industry.

SLD: We also see other standards that don’t go anywhere and which aren’t fully baked. How do we bridge those worlds?
Heinlein: There’s nothing like a killer app to cause standardization. I recently bought a Nest thermostat. Being able to detect when you’re there and when you’re not there, and then turn the heat down, is pretty interesting. You can imagine having those kinds of sensors in every room so it knows you’re not just behind a closed door. An app like that may seed other standards. Bluetooth Low Energy, ZigBee—those sorts of standards have been around and are beginning to take hold. Once one or two of those begin to take hold and get critical mass, the industry will rally around them.
Logvinov: I see multiple standards in places where we have a push for technology, and far fewer in places where we have a pull for the technology. If you look at standards driven by service providers willing to adopt something, the convergence happened very quickly. Where you see silicon vendors or equipment vendors trying to push standards forward, there is always a flurry of multiple directions.

By Ed Sperling
System-Level Design sat down to discuss the Internet of Things with Jack Guedj, president and CEO of Tensilica; John Heinlein, vice president of marketing for the physical IP division of ARM; Kamran Izadi, director of sourcing and supplier management at Cisco; and Oleg Logvinov, director of market development for STMicroelectronics’ Industrial and Power Conversion Division. What follows are excerpts of that conversation, which was held in front of a live audience at the recent GSA Silicon Summit.

SLD: What will the Internet of Things really going to be?
Heinlein: Everything that can be connected to the Internet will be connected. Just think about all the data that exists around you, whether it’s in your office, your home or your car. There’s tons of data that isn’t being collected, analyzed or delivered to you in a beneficial way. Because of the trends in integration, scale and innovation of deeply embedded products, we can add value and begin to connect devices that were never connected before.
Guedj: When people think about the Internet of things they think about connection to the Internet. We’re going to go from billions of connected devices to tens of billions of connected devices. Therein lies a great opportunity for all of us to capitalize on that. One topic we’re not discussing is that the only way this is going to work is if it’s seamless to the user. That involves a lot of adaptability, whether it’s in control or signal processing, and a lot of hiding of things—the software complexity is very high—while also keeping a small footprint. The only way we will get pervasiveness is if consumers can seamlessly access any kind of elements in their home or their bodies, anytime and anywhere.
Izadi: The superset of this is what we call the Internet of Everything. It’s about process, people, things and data. The things piece involves the objects that will get added to the Internet. There will be 37 billion new devices by 2020 on the Internet. But if you look at the other aspect, which is the people piece, the data piece and the process piece have to come together to make this a reality. What’s important is making sure there is seamless communication, intelligence and the handshaking that has to happen to make sure this is seamless and cohesive.
Logvinov: The Internet of Things is the singularity of us and machines. It’s us becoming smarter, as well as our environment becoming smarter about us. It’s about making better-informed decisions, as well as being more precise about what we need without us even understanding how it happens. Data analytics that will be digested in the embedded intelligence at every point of what we touch and what touches us is what the Internet of Things is about.

SLD: As an industry we seem to be focused on pushing down to the next process node, but the Internet of Things utilizes older processes. Where is the opportunity?
Heinlein: There will be a need for servers and infrastructure to connect all of this stuff, but as we get to the edge, which is what people think about—the things that touch us or our environment—nodes are irrelevant. It’s more about 10-year battery life on the coin cell. Those things are going to be done on 180nm ultra-low-leakage libraries or thick-gate oxide libraries that run at much lower speeds but where the leakage is in pico-amps. This will consume many different levels of the process technology family. We’ve been innovating at 180, 90 and 65nm quite actively.

SLD: This is sort of a rebound effect, isn’t it? We’re taking technology that was developed at the leading edge of Moore’s Law and rolling it backward.
Heinlein: That’s right. When 180nm came out, people didn’t do power gating or the kinds of power techniques that are now de rigueur in design. We’ve put power management capabilities, power gating and leakage control in EDA support, as well as in the IP itself, so people can do power management in these older nodes in a new way.
Guedj: It’s not so much about performance anymore. The analog component will play a bigger role. Can we move the technology on that end? Mixed signal will play a much more important role. It’s the integration of all of these pieces that are not all in the digital domain, and how do you standardize all of that IP so that there’s an abstraction layer you can build on top of. That’s going to be the challenge.
Logvinov: When we say performance that also means integration of multiple functions together. That’s more important than just the CPU inside of a device. One watt per year costs us about $2 these days, and that price will rise. It’s not just about how fast it is. It’s also about how energy-efficient it is, and whether we’re conscious about what we’re transmitting—and that we’re only transmitting when we need to.
Guedj: You do need fat pipes to the cloud, and those require extremely aggressive geometries and high performance. The consumer will not tolerate latency. We’re all used to clicking the channel and being able to change when we want to with the click of a button. At the same time, there is integration with the local devices, which will have analog and digital interfaces. There the challenge is low-power intelligence, which is not trivial. With some of those sensors you need to be able to aggregate the information. You may be able to send some information to the cloud and have the cloud get back to you with an intelligent response, assuming that you have a good connection. You need that level of intelligence and programmability, which is what we’ve been working on for the past year or two with optimization capabilities. Also, you need a somewhat seamless passage from the local device signal process to the cloud, and that boundary may move depending on what network connection you have and where you are, so you need to balance those factors.

SLD: Who’s going to reap the profits?
Guedj: Where there are opportunities and challenges, there is money to be made. Whether it’s in the ultra high performance or programmability, there are challenges in the IP, in the tools, you need the power savings, you need the physical layer IP—all of that has to come together.
Heinlein: If we do it right, everybody will gain. There are problems to be solved at every layer of the stack, from the high end in the cloud all the way down to the implementation and the software and services. There will be new application streams developed. We’re working on a platform called mbed, which allows rapid low-cost prototyping. You can buy a $12 board, plug it into your computer, go on the Internet and within an hour develop an application that you can begin to prototype. That means there’s a whole cottage industry with new services and concepts. There will be a potential revolution at every layer.
Guedj: Companies that nurture a strong ecosystem have a very high chance of success. On one side they can work with OEM partners to address customer needs. On the other side, they can address the technology. The challenges are different, but the opportunities are huge. Data I’ve seen suggest this is a $14 trillion opportunity over 10 years. That’s across the entire ecosystem, but there are a lot of players that can reap benefits.
Logvinov: Who will profit is a loaded question. If you look at semiconductors they’re enabling components. What is the cost of a small gyroscope inside a smart phone? It’s pretty low. But if you look at the dollar amount generated by services attached to it and the dollars spent on advertisers on getting location-based information and behavioral models of consumers. It’s reasonable to assume that at some time in the future we may see a shift in the business model. Conventional models still apply for silicon vendors and IP vendors making money. But if you fast forward into the future, analytics may become the basis for service and moneymaking models we haven’t thought about yet.
Heinlein: What’s interesting is when businesses recognize there’s a real win-win. If you could buy an Internet-connected, Internet-enabled dishwasher, that knows to start itself when there is a dip in the energy demand and PG&E gives you a 5% break on your kilowatt hours, that’s a win-win. Plus, you buy a better dishwasher. So maybe it’s four or five wins. That’s the kind of benefit that we’ll see coming out of this.

By Ann Steffora Mutschler

The term, ‘Internet of Things,’ was first coined more than a decade ago by technology visionary Kevin Ashton but has slowly trickled down to the world of chip design and is now mentioned constantly in conversation. The reason is simple: System-level design tools are getting sophisticated enough to handle the intricacies required by devices in an Internet of Things.

Herein lays the potential for EDA to play a role in this emerging market.

According to Wally Rhines, chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphics, “A lot of people would look at it and say, ‘The Internet of Things’ means low-cost sensors. The world of complex systems says you have to be able to design and simulate large numbers of things tied together and interacting. The complexity increases at least as the square of the number of components. If you count the interactions, as long as you have a limited number of air-pressure, light and motion sensors, you can have dedicated signal processing for each of those sensors. But as they start interacting with each other, those interactions have to be verified and analyzed. When you think about the Internet of Things, we now have more Internet nodes than people. The amount of verification required will go up as the square of the number of nodes.”

The Internet of Things is a really interesting and exciting area that will drive some substantial changes in how and which chips get built and maybe more importantly how they get used, according to Drew Wingard, chief technical officer at Sonics. “To think of it as a new market I don’t think is right. There are some places where it will be a new market, but I think it’s really an extension of existing markets. People talk about the Internet of Things, they talk about machines getting connected in for the most part and these machines already exist and they already have chips inside them. The interesting question is how do those machines get connected, or get connected in a more useful way than how they have been before.”

Enabling this all to happen are the communications protocols. The goal is to simplify how devices get connected to the Internet of Things, just as nodes on a network now connect almost seamlessly to the Internet.

“This is heavily focused on wireless standards,” said Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris. “And from a network standpoint, it’s about lots of heterogeneous traffic and the segmentation of that traffic so you can prioritize it.”

The Internet of Things is a big opportunity for the makers of NoCs and buses such as ARM’s AMBA on the chip. It’s also a huge opportunity for routing big data, which is why companies such as Cisco have been so actively promoting the Internet of Things.

That leads to the second aspect of the Internet of Things. If they are connected, what features do they enable, and which ones are most important and to whom. This will be particularly important in an automobile, where engine and braking functions will need to take precedence over a phone call.

Some rather bizarre ideas have surfaced for the Internet of Things, such as recipes communicated to a refrigerator or a touchscreen with a Twitter feed on a washing machine. At the very least, many of these screens will be color and they will try out new functionality that may or may not catch on.

Sonics’ Wingard called this the ‘smartphonification’ of consumer devices. “We start looking at chips that look like many smartphone chips. When we look at what companies who’ve been exiting the smartphone application processor space say they’re going to do next with these assets, they always talk about the Internet of Things. What’s fundamentally different about this class of design is the unit volumes for an individual targeted device are lower. If you look at the total number of washing machines they sell a year, it’s small compared to the total number of smart phones they sell. It’s not that there are any fewer people interested in owning one, but you may not have four of them in your house.” What this means is that the ability to build these Internet of Things devices must be able to be built for less than the $200 million it costs today to design and build an applications processor.

This is where EDA comes in, Wingard asserted. “We have to come up with mechanisms for building these chips, which are in many ways every bit as complex as an application processor from 5 or 10 years ago, but we’ve got to do it for $10 million so we need more automation. This is one of those places where this is an opportunity for this ‘platform’ word that we used to use 5 or 10 years ago to really come into play because there probably will be more similarities than differences between how these different things are going to work.”

Those closest to being able to do this today are the companies that are building high-end microcontrollers. They have a cost model for how to do their designs that matches this, they’ve already been migrating away from the 8 and 16 bit processors into 32 bit processors. “In some applications like the pin pads you interact with when you check out at the grocery store. They’re beginning to add graphics into their stuff so they’re actually in a pretty good place to get there. Still, these are more complex chips and there are a lot more ways they can fail. The mixed-signal content on most microcontrollers today is pretty simple in comparison with what you’d have to do to actually handle the real conductivity requirements of these things. You’re going to find some really interesting work for the EDA companies,” he added.

Frank Schirrmeister, group director for product marketing of the System Development Suite at Cadence, breaks down the requirements for the Internet of Things into three areas.

First is ‘the Thing’ itself that requires very intricate design pieces. “AMS design is very important. Design for low-power is crucial because those things need to be there as a thing independent. And in the context of the smart dust concepts, you need to be able to recharge potentially because if the thing is somewhere and you don’t exactly know where it is, you can’t just go and change the battery that easily. You want to do things like renewable energy, things based on movement and what have you. Those are all items that influence the design of the Thing.”

This will all require additional simulation, verification, AMS design along with its software, specific and very targeted low-power software implementations, along with virtual platforms and the software executing on it.

Second is the question of what to do with the data, which falls under the realm of big data and how to analyze it to make decisions based on it. However, it is unclear as to whether EDA will play are here, he pointed out, since it is more of a server, data center, algorithm crunching activity.

The third area is the networking/conductivity aspect to the Internet of Things. “Interestingly enough,” Schirrmeister pointed out, “that may cause a revival of the type of tools that in the past were used for network analysis/ performance analysis.”  Back in the 1990s, Cadence has one such tool called BONES (block-oriented network simulator), which was subsequently sold.

These tools could play a role in the Internet of Things and could be used for network planning, which is mildly connected to the type of analysis done when looking at chip interconnect, he pointed out.

While none of the EDA vendors has tools today for interconnect analysis because it has been traditionally a pure networking task, it could be an area for the industry to focus on, joining companies like Thingworx.

Parallels with chip design

Cary Chin, director of marketing for low-power solutions at Synopsys, said the technologies behind the Internet of Things, including RFID and ZigBee standards, mimic what’s been going on in chip design over number of years.

One of the clear parallels he sees is that as everything has become digital, which occurred with digital audio and more recently with digital video. The problems are transformed into digital problems. That then hits the knee of the curve and things take off because now they’re part of the Moore’s Law equation, he said.

“I see very much this idea of the Internet of things associated with the two big changes that we’ve seen in computer technology in chips in the last 10 years or so: communications and power. With communications the change from analog kind of cellular to digital cellular created an explosion in the technology, and that’s happened over the last 10 years. With power—it’s really within the last five years, and is still going on—it’s looking at the concept of when does power become digital, and digital to the extent that we can manipulate it with our digital tools.”

What he expects to happen is that technology is going to start explode with the ability to view communications and power as part of computing. The power piece really hasn’t gotten there yet and I think that’s why power is so interesting to many people these days even given the big of answers in the last few years is because it still hasn’t crossed over.

The problem today is that power is much more global and we don’t have a good way of making it much more hierarchical, more self-contained, more automatable so tools can be used to do it rather than having to contain it all within our brains which are limited in complexity, Chin said. “That’s really the trick, and there’s a lot that EDA can learn from these kinds of things. We’re at the point on the chip side where we are starting to develop some very interesting technologies at the system-level, which start to encompass layers of software, which start to encompass all of the these interesting pieces at a very high level. We’re starting to treat the software as part of what we used to consider part of the chip, too. You view the whole thing and you can create a model of the whole thing and check its behavior. That kind of thinking and bringing that level of complexity to the system-level design for this other area of the Internet of Things will be very interesting.”

What used to be just standards for bar codes a decade ago also is now starting to be shared.

“There are all of the standards in the ZigBee realm that allow us to build the complexity that we are used to in chip design, but really learn something from those guys in looking at a high system level view,” he added. “There’s going to be information to be passed and to be learned back and forth between the ideas of completely self-contained system-level design. That would be a cool problem for EDA because we’re not used to thinking that way. We end at the edge of the chip and we’re just starting to think beyond that.”

By Ed Sperling
Synopsys’ Parag Goel highlights some of the papers on verification and SystemVerilog that will be presented at next week’s Synopsys User Group, aka SNUG. If you’re registered, grab a large cup of coffee. There are papers here from Freescale, Intel, Cisco, AMD and others.

Cadence’s Jack Erickson sheds some light on an intriguing paper about sharing approaches for high-level synthesis, which was unveiled at DATE this week. After years of promise, HLS is beginning to take off. It’s amazing what a few hundred million extra gates can do to a market.

Mentor’s Dennis Brophy notes that the IEEE unanimously approved the new Unified Power Format standard, bringing visual acuity to a bad case of double vision. It may take some time to clean up this mess of dueling power formats, but this is a major step forward.

Real Intent’s Jim Foley takes a deep dive into non-block assignments for combinational logic. If you work in this area, grab a knife and fork.

Arteris’ Kurt Shuler examines IP transaction protocols, including AMBA, OCP and others, and why interconnects need to be agnostic.

ARM’s Karthik Ranjan looks at bringing the benefits of smartphones to Pay TV, a change that will be fueled by “headless gateways.” This sounds like something out of a Tim Burton film, but Internet TV is long overdue—especially when you pay for 500 channels and can’t find anything to watch.

Synopsys’ Eric Huang woke up in the wrong time zone. Why else would someone look this happy in the middle of the day? (Scroll down to the photo.)

Cadence’s Richard Goering captures the meat of the recent EDA CEO panel last week on subjects ranging from consolidation to Moore’s Law. Make sure you check out the picture. Who’s having fun and who isn’t? Goering also shed some light on why Cadence agreed to buy Tensilica and what it means for SoC design.

Mentor’s Colin Walls takes on the concept of endianness—so named for code ordering based upon the shape of an egg. Code is written either right to left or left to right depending on whether it’s little endian of big endian—a problem that plagued the Unix world for decades. These days, it’s a relatively simple fix, as long as you plan for it.

Synopsys’ Navraj Nandra explains what “gears” mean for the MIPI M-PHY. This gives new meaning to the term “gear head.”

Cadence’s Frank Schirrmeister explains the Internet of Things, which is expected to include 50 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2020. Apparently cows are on the list of things, which is certain to confuse animal rights activists.

Synopsys’ Karen Bartleson interviews Russ Housley, chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force, on how the Internet works. It’s nice to see something can work so well with no one in charge of it.

And in case you missed last week’s Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering newsletter, here are some noteworthy blogs:

—Docea Power’s Ghislain Kaiser pinpoints five things you need to consider in low-power verification.

—Apache Design’s Norman Chang digs into ESD compact models for chip-package-system simulation.

—Atrenta’s Bernard Murphy compares guesswork to other design approaches.

—Power architect Barry Pangrle notes that leadership changes across the industry could herald much bigger changes ahead.

—Tensilica’s Chris Rowen looks behind the scenes at his company’s history and purchase by Cadence.

—Mentor’s Tom Fitzpatrick shows off some best practices for power control modeling in verification.

—And Synopsys’ Cary Chin looks at the fine balance between standards and healthy competition.

Mentor Graphics introduced a tool for thermal characterization for semiconductor packaging and design, which has become essential as density on an SoC continues to grow, along with both active and static power leakage. The new FloTHERM IC solution is a Web-based platform that simplifies many of the characterization and validation tasks.

Rumors of Magma’s death appear to have been overstated. The company generated revenues of $31 million for its fiscal Q3, ended Jan. 31. It had a net loss of $2.6 million, but when you compare that to a net loss of $78 million in the previous year—not to mention that the company beat expectations—things are definitely on the upswing. Revenue is expected to be relatively flat over the next quarter. Like many EDA companies these days, proof of success will be the bottom line, not the top line. Magma says it has positive cash flow.

Intel Capital and a group of 24 VC firms pledged to invest $3.5 billion in U.S.-based technology companies over the next two years. Intel’s share will be $200 million. In addition, a group of 17 technology companies ranging from Intel to EMC, Cisco, Marvell and Broadcom said they will increase their hiring of college graduates—some by doubling their hiring over previous years—to sustain the market for future scientists and engineers. This is very good news.

IBM put a green spotlight on the lithography process, creating fluorine-free photo-acid generator compounds that are used to transfer patterns onto wafers. Green is good, and in IBM’s case it’s also the green that comes from licensing patents.

TSMC is collaborating with Dialog Semiconductor on a bipolar-CMOS-DMOS technology that can improve power management in chips for portable devices. Dialog, in case the name doesn’t ring a bell, is based in Stuttgart, Germany.

GlobalFoundries Singapore—the company previously known as Chartered Semiconductor—announced a tender offer for any and all of its senior notes due in 2010. Consider this yet another step in a complete takeover of this foundry by ATIC, the Abu Dhabi-based investment powerhouse.

By Ed Sperling

Arteris raised $9.7 million in a new “strategic” round of funding. While that may not seem like a lot of money, what’s far more interesting is who led that group—ARM and Qualcomm. Our take is that ARM thinks the NoC is a potential alternative to AMBA, the on-chip bus standard created by ARM, even though it won’t come out and say that. And Qualcomm is going to need NoCs to solve some of the complexity of power islands and multiple cores. Other investors are Synopsys and Japan’s giant DoCoMo Capital. This may speak volumes about the future of NoCs.

Mentor Graphics’ displaced workers program is the kind of industry involvement we need to see more of. So far, 452 engineers have taken classes through the program, and there are more classes available. Retooling is always a good idea, even if you’re not unemployed. For information, click here.

Synopsys was chosen by Hisilicon as its primary EDA partner. If the name sounds unfamiliar, just remember that Hisilicon is a subsidiary of Huawei—the Cisco of China. (There are some at Cisco who still insist that relationship is literal, even though Cisco dropped its IP theft lawsuit back in 2004.)

Actel updated its Q4 financial outlook. Revenues are expected to be right on target, which is up sequentially 2% to 6%. There’s nothing like hitting your numbers after a long recession.

Along the same lines, TSMC’s sales edged up 0.6% in November vs. October. If that doesn’t sound like much, consider that the foundry’s sales were down 17% for the first 10 months. November 2009 sales, incidentally, are 52% higher than November 2008. Break out the plastic cups.

TSMC is either feeling good about its numbers or looking for a hedge in the future–or both. The company invested $193 million in Motech Industries, a Taiwanese solar cell manufacturer that also owns its own fabs. In the recent downturn, though, solar didn’t work particularly well as a hedge strategy.

Mentor expanded its Questa multi-view verification components library to support the latest standards, including USB 3.0, Ethernet 40/100G and DDR2.

Cadence won a deal with AppliedMicro, which has standardized on Cadence’s Encounter platform.

By Ed Sperling

Synopsys’ Navraj Nandra poses a very interesting question: Can high k/metal gate survive in the 28nm low-power race. That all depends on who you ask. The answer might not be the same for Intel as a fabless company working off restrictive design rules. Nevertheless, this blog is worth a read.

The issue of reliability has been a topic of serious discussion for months as we push toward 32/28nm. Tradeoffs in power, performance, area and the sheer complexity of increased density and manufacturability have raised red flags everywhere among designers. Now comes the real-world example. Check out what happened when Cisco’s Ramanathan Sambamurthy and his associates used an environment for constrained verification to apply a stress test.

What exactly is software simulation? It sounds clear-cut enough, but Mentor’s Colin Walls proves otherwise. It’s an interesting look at how differently embedded software engineers see the world from their brethren on the hardware side. It’s no wonder they don’t share tables in the cafeteria. Question: ‘Is this seat taken?’ Answer: ‘In some respects yes, in others, no.’

Cadence’s Jason Andrews takes a look at the memory intensiveness of debugging and why it matters in system-level design. It may be intrusive, but it’s certainly not intuitive.

The United States celebrated World Standards Day yesterday—a week ahead of the real birthday of ISO. So much for standards. Did they not notice the calendar, or was something else happening next week? Check out Karen Bartleson’s column for why this is a big deal, anyway.

If you can follow Frank Schirrmeister’s moving chart you get the rapid eye movement award. You’ll get the general idea, and the blog is quite interesting, but don’t stare at that graphic too long. Hint: Click quickly and it will open up something you can actually read.

What can you do with USB 3.0. Synopsys’ Eric Huang posed that question. There’s no right answer, but it does at least inspire some interesting guesses.

By Ed Sperling

Santa Clara, Calif.—Feb. 5, 2009—Cross-cultural communication has always had its challenges, but globalization is raising it from the level of nuisance to necessity.

Across the board, from systems companies to those that develop the tools to build the components that go into those systems, building international teams that can embrace a single corporate culture has emerged as one of the big business challenges.

“The main learning about having different sites around the globe is respecting the culture of where that site is,” Rich Goldman, vice president of strategic alliances at Synopsys, said during a panel at DesignCon. “Engineers are the same around the world, so there is a certain level of communication that always works. But at another level, cultures are very different. What you may think is the worst thing possible is a normal part of culture for another country. You have to go to that country to experience it. That’s the only way to overcome differences.”

And overcoming those differences is essential. Cisco’s vice president of engineering, Sri Hosakote, said globalization is a core competency of every company that does business in a global economy. “It’s a skill that is mandatory,” he said.

Hosakote said one of the keys is getting employees in other countries to understand the corporate mission the same way employees do in a place like Silicon Valley. That frequently requires bringing managers to the United States, letting them sit in on meetings and work in Silicon Valley and sometimes even enrolling them in executive courses at schools like Stanford. He said when that happens, “they get it.”

“It takes two to five years to get a culture of globalization,” he said. “Collaboration is the hardest piece. It’s particularly hard when it comes to multiple sites.

But there’s more to operating in a global environment than just a common vision. There also has to be an efficient structure everywhere. Brani Buric, executive vice president of marketing and sales at Virage Logic, said that for every situation—whether the operation is located in a place where labor is cheap or expensive—the office has to be optimized.

“What we’re seeing with globalization is just the first phase,” Buric said. “A couple of years from now this will go way beyond product engineering and R&D. New markets are opening and we will see good product specs for markets in places like China. There will be R&D, specs, marketing, implementation and a sales channel in these places.

One facet of globalization is outsourcing. While outsourcing continues to gain ground in markets such as IT services and support, many technology companies believe the cost differential is not enough to offset the benefits of having their own operation—whether it’s R&D or sales—in a foreign country.

“Sometimes running it ourselves is cheaper in some ways,” said Kirk Law, vice president of systems products engineering at NetApp. “There are a lot of different ways to measure value. It’s not just a spreadsheet decision.”