On the heels of the announcement of an entirely new analog design tool suite comes something else surprising. And I can’t quite figure it out.

I received an “announcement” of a new HLS (i.e., nominally, a C-to-VHDL) tool called HercuLeS. Except that the announcement didn’t read like a commercial launch: it read more like a note to friends and colleagues. It was written by Nikolaos Kavvadian, who describes himself in his email signature as “Lecturer, Research scientist, Hardware developer, Ph. … Read More → "HLS from Scratch"

In the domain of deciding which embedded functionality should go in hardware and which in software, some architects have a philosophy of keeping as much in software as possible. That’s because software is inherently much more flexible than hardware. Even if you’re using an FPGA, there’s always the, “what if it doesn’t route?” fear. With software, as long as it fits in the allocated code store, you can do anything you want.

This is, of course, part of the motivation of software-define radio (SDR). Years ago, I … Read More → "Keep it in Software"

A few weeks ago we looked at a local “boutique” Bay Area manufacturing operation that was struggling to stay local and “sustainable.” Inherent in the effort is the assumption that local is better, resulting in a smaller human footprint (carbon or otherwise).

But is that always the case?

This week a European group issued a press release on work they’ve done to assemble an embedded systems tool flow. Called the INTERESTED project (I won’t … Read More → "Thinking a Bit Too Local"

In this “advanced” age of EDA, it’s not uncommon for new point tools to come along, improving some bottleneck in an otherwise reasonably well-established tool chain. What’s less common is for an entire new tool flow to emerge. And it’s even less common yet for one to emerge all from a single company. And a small one, no less.

And yet that’s what’s happened recently in the analog/custom world. Vivid Engineering, at its roots a design services house, has launched Symica (they haven’ … Read More → "Starting from Scratch"

Harris did a poll recently at the behest of a German company called TeamViewer that provides access to computer data from anywhere. The study asks questions about where people want to be able to access data they don’t have with them. I’m assuming they also did the study before developing the product, but this data is recent.

While TeamViewer provided some distilled statistics in their press release, they also put some raw data tables in there, which provide a couple other humorous insights.

The real take-away from this whole … Read More → "Where do you want to get to your data?"

For the last couple years, “envelope tracking” has caught on as a way to reduce power in phones, cellular base stations, and digital broadcast transmitters. The idea is that RF power amplifiers are most efficient when the signal amplitude runs near the drain voltage, operating in or near saturation or “compression.” When the signal isn’t running that high, then, with a constant power level on the amplifier, the remainder of that power is wasted as heat.

With envelope tracking (ET), the signal envelope is detected and fed to a power modulator … Read More → "Tracking the Envelope"

Last week OSCI and Accellera decided to join forces. To some extent, this might be viewed as the union of the abstract and the concrete. OSCI lives in the world of SystemC and TLM; much of what Accellera does is further down the abstraction stack (although UVM shows that Accellera was already moving up). 

To some extent these are two different worlds (when discussing verification recently with someone, I mentioned TLM… and got looked at like I had grown a second head because the person lived in the concrete pre-mask verification world). But if the … Read More → "Your Standard Merger"

Feeling somehow less worthy in the shadow of the passing of Bob Pease… (with no offense intended towards Docea…)

I spent a few minutes with Docea at DAC a couple weeks ago. You may recall their Aceplorer product dealing with both power and thermal analysis. Two things caught my eye, one of which is a new feature, the other something they’re working on.

The new feature is scenario generation. This is particularly applicable to multi-mode designs, where different modes are exercised as different … Read More → "Scenarios – Certain and Less So"