Then trouble came. Over in the desktop and enterprise development worlds, it seemed, a revolution was afoot. The dominance of the desktop development environment of Microsoft had sewn the seeds of a socialist revolution. A not-so-secret society had spawned a groundswell of collaborative development among several companies and independent software developers who wanted to create an alternative for themselves – to take control of their own development destinies. Following in the footsteps of the Linux phenomenon, Eclipse was born.

Conceived in late 2001, Eclipse arrived as the alternative to the ubiquitous Microsoft Visual Studio series. It is an … Read More → "Eclipsing all Others"

The larger company, however, faces a situation where they can fall victim to the spoils of their own success. Once upon a time, they too were focused, fast-reacting, hard-driving startups. At some point, however, they probably made a major score with a successful product line that propelled them into the big leagues. With that membership card comes a bloat of baggage – support for existing product lines, protection of previously captured market territory, more employees to water and feed, reputations to protect, policies to follow, and legal hurdles to clear. The innovation balance can tip wildly away from their … Read More → "Innovation Big and Small – Chapter 2"

Caffeine, cold liquid, and carbonation re-open Roger’s sagging eyes. His monitor locks back into sharp focus again. His latest unit test run will be done within a couple of minutes. If it passes, he’ll check in the files, kick off a build, and head home for two or three hours of real bed rest before trying to make himself look semi-professional for the presentation at 9AM. He doesn’t want to be too slick. People expect a lead engineer at a startup to have a certain patina.

If the demo goes well and the customer … Read More → "Innovation Big and Small"

Any engineering discipline done well should ultimately be self-eradicating. The key problems should be solved from the bottom up, and the creative genius of each generation should be absorbed into the collective tooling, IP, and best-practice methodologies of the next. Today, digital design bears little resemblance to what I learned in school twenty something years ago. For many of today’s bright young engineers, DeMorgan equivalents are something they learned in an introductory logic design class, but not anything they apply in their day-to-day work. They’re much more likely to be worried about whether the Ethernet … Read More → "Death of the Hardware Engineer"

Much has been made in the technical press about various approaches for automatically parallelizing general-purpose computing. However, there are occasional outstanding opportunities to create domain-specific solutions that can elegantly and efficiently elevate the performance of mission-critical tasks. Mentor Graphics has found such an opportunity in printed circuit board (PCB) routing with their newly-announced “XtremeAR” tool. They have crafted a system that can accelerate the arduous task of PCB auto-routing using up to 15 networked nodes, turning multi-day turnaround times into overnight iterations.

PCB routing has become a bottleneck in many board-based system designs. Increased levels of … Read More → "Parallelizing PCB"