A Mile in Their Shoes
At some level, the business of running any big international corporation is largely the same. In high technology, however, the mundanity of macromanaging a large organization often insulates executives from the actual technology challenges faced by both their customers and their own engineers. At Altium, they do things a little differently. Nick is an electronics engineer at heart, and his company provides design automation software aimed at helping the average working engineer get his job done better and faster. In order to accomplish that goal, Nick feels that everyone working to deliver that capability, himself included, needs to walk … Read More → "A Mile in Their Shoes"
Forgotten Battles
I pushed the button to turn off the night vision scope, but the eerie greenish image of the Utah desert landscape persisted. The characteristic cloud of sparkling noise continued to dance in my viewfinder making it look like the desert had been invaded by an army of crazed fireflies. Otherwise, the scene was devoid of any movement from the nocturnal desert life I had been seeking.
Somewhere, possibly thousands of miles away and maybe dead by now, there is an engineer for whom the design of this particular scope was a major project – someone who fought with … Read More → "Forgotten Battles"
Forgotten Battles
Somewhere, possibly thousands of miles away and maybe dead by now, there is an engineer for whom the design of this particular scope was a major project – someone who fought with colleagues over issues like the choice of materials in the image sensor, the scheme for light amplification, and the design of the power supply. Perhaps the project was some cold-war-era Soviet skunkworks design. Unlike me, this engineer understands (or understood) almost instinctively why this device continues to operate for several minutes after it is powered down. His story, however, is probably long forgotten.
It was the … Read More → "Forgotten Battles"
MIPS for your Media Room
With HDTV now making the transition from exotic to ordinary, consumers naturally expect the audio portion of their experience to keep pace with the vast improvement in video quality. While stereo, lower-fidelity sound might have been perfectly acceptable with standard definition television and movie programming, the consumer’s standard for acceptable audio performance is elevated considerably by the act of plunking down a few thousand for the latest-generation plasma or DLP monitors with HDTV tuners and DVRs. Chances are, they’ve got a similarly expensive sound system with way more than two channels eagerly awaiting top-quality content … Read More → "MIPS for your Media Room"
Critical Commoditization
The fortress of an established FPGA company has many walls. One side is defended by the incredible cost of creating a competitive programmable logic architecture in a cutting-edge process geometry. With the leverage of a process node or two between you and your competitors, you can successfully fend off an attack by a less-established company simply by being in production with a line of parts on the current smallest geometry available. However, the basic architectures of programmable logic are now fairly well known and not well defended by current patents, so anybody with good business sense, a … Read More → "Critical Commoditization"
Wind River Zooms In
This time, Wind River is touting a new release of their “Commercial Grade Linux” product line. WR’s Linux offering is always based on an unmodified version of Linux (in this case 2.6.14 replacing the company’s previously-supported 2.6.10). As such, each new Wind River release gains the benefits of the new Linux release in addition to the new features and patches that WR has included in its add-ons. According to the company’s announcement, 2.6.14 includes ” …hardware-specific drivers for additional processors and boards, updates to development tools, real-time performance and scheduling-related patches, high resolution timer patches, security, networking updates to … Read More → "Wind River Zooms In"
FPGAs at DAC
Despite some popular speculation, “DAC” does not stand for “Declining ASIC Commiseration.” The Design Automation Conference is a robust and lively gathering of companies, customers and comrades sharing a common interest in the progressive automation of the electronic design process. As we’ve discussed the past couple of weeks, however, the historical focus of DAC has been on the custom and semi-custom digital IC design process. Sure, there have always been other disciplines and interests represented, but the money, the momentum, and the fear have always been centered around the completion of complex IC designs and the … Read More → "FPGAs at DAC"
Electronic Elitism
The 43rd annual Design Automation Conference (DAC) got underway yesterday in San Francisco, California. The technical sessions have begun, the exhibits are open, and the parties, PowerPoints and pejoratives have now commenced. Last night, at a media, analyst, and customer briefing dinner at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walden Rhines, Chairman and CEO, hosted a customer presentation explaining how Mentor’s new Caliber nmDRC accelerates nanometer design rule checking by “hyperscaling” – a technique that takes efficient advantage of multiple processing elements to deliver many times the previous performance in giant DRC runs.
