Thomas Jefferson must be rolling in his grave.

Google wants to spend $12.5 billion to acquire the part of Motorola that still makes cell phones, but it’s really Moto’s patents, not its hardware, that is the real attraction. How important are the patents? During the official announcement, Google CEO Larry Page used the words “defend” and protect” several times, but never once mentioned “innovation,” “enabling,” or invention.” In short, Moto’s portfolio of 17,000 patents (with another 7,000 pending) will be used to build a defensive moat around the company.

How broken is that? Patents that … Read More → "Google’s $12.5 Billion Moat Monster"

Good discussion Bryon. Any good strategy is bigger than any one person or any one company. I believe EDA360 makes perfect sense. The day after it was published, I called John Bruggeman to thank him for spending more money educating the market than I could ever dream of spending. I got to know him a bit after that call, and found him to be a breath of fresh air in EDA. At Atrenta, we have used the SoC Realization part of EDA360 to describe what we do and why it matters. The label fits. It simply feels right and … Read More → "Good discussion Bryon. Any good"

There are certain people that are unlikely to leave those whom they encounter without an opinion. John Bruggeman is one such person. If you’ve ever watched him present, he controls the stage like an old-time revival preacher. He’s not convincing you of anything; he’s expounding absolute truths and you better get on board if you know what’s good for you. There are those in the press who have been scolded by him for not promoting his vision or embracing some new buzzword he coined.

Most recently, he’s … Read More → "EDA180"

On the heels of the series of sensor articles we did, I found some new sensor attention at Semicon West. While the focus of the session was MEMS in general, a couple of the presentations elaborated more on the kinds of sensors and applications they enable.

First was Jo de Boeck of imec. His focus was on detecting volatile compounds in the air or in someone’s breath – what they call … Read More → "Sensors at Semicon West"

Deep packet inspection (DPI) is all about understanding what’s in network traffic – minimally, to be aware of it (an intrusion detection system, or IDS), but, more commonly these days, to do something about it (an intrusion prevention system, or IPS).

Part 1 of our DPI coverage was motivated by a DPI bake-off run by Netronome. The benchmark used was the Snort algorithm. Snort is a free, open-source program for implementing IDS or IPS, and it has been widely used. It consists of … Read More → "Open-Source DPI"

We’ve looked in the past at some of the APIs put together by the Multicore Association, notably the MCAPI communications API (and its update) and the MRAPI resource management API. In the same spirit, they are now taking up the issue of task management.

The whole idea with multicore software is that a program can be decomposed … Read More → "Managing Multicore Tasks"

When companies acquire other companies, part of the buzz consists of speculation about what will happen. Did the acquiring company simply remove a competitor from the market? Will business continue as usual? Will the technology be repurposed?

Last year, Synopsys went on a buying spree, and a couple days ago they announced the results of the combined inputs of Virtio, VAST, and CoWare, not to mention their own efforts on top of that, in their new Virtualizer product.

This tool is intended both for creating virtual prototypes and then using them in a verification flow, … Read More → "The Fruits of Acquisition"

In this week’s multicore automation article, we talked about multicore and we talked about concurrency. It’s easy to conflate these two concepts, so an important distinction should be drawn. The terminology isn’t particularly precise here, but the notions are.

“Multicore” typically refers to a computing platform. The number associated with it is the number of cores available for running a program. This number is completely independent of the program being run (although for embedded systems, it may have been … Read More → "Multicore and Concurrency"