Editors' Blog

Quicker LTE Validation

Each new communications protocol adds to the complexity of its predecessor, and the 3GPP-LTE cellular standard is no exception. According to Synopsys, there are more than a thousand tests specified in the standard to ensure compliance.

And it’s actually twice that bad: before you cut a chip, you need to verify the design against those tests. Then, when the chip comes out, you need to verify the actual silicon against the same tests.

For this reason, Synopsys – maker of pre-silicon design tools – and Rhode & Schwarz – maker of post-silicon, real, … Read More → "Quicker LTE Validation"

Stop Repeating Yourself

by Dick Selwood

You may recall a while back – actually, a good while back – we looked at parasitic extraction tools and contrasted the field solver approach with Silicon Frontline’s random-walk approach. Reprised really briefly, with the random walk approach, rather than dividing the entire structure up into chunks and solving the whole thing, you follow lots of random paths through dielectric until you hit metal, and, statistically, you end up with the precision needed to determine the parasitics in all three dimensions.

As with all such … Read More → "Stop Repeating Yourself"

Is There an App for That?

by Amelia Dalton

Cadence just announced that it’s adding a web portal facility to its OrCAD Capture tool, and they’re enabling two different capabilities with this. The first is obvious: allowing easier access to relevant information from the OrCAD ecosystem.

But more interesting is the ability to buy apps. Now… presumably this is different from phone apps stores, where the strength – hundreds of thousands of apps – is also the weakness (why having to choose between 100 different random indistinguishable variants of the same function is a good thing is unclear to me).

Coming to a Screen Near You?

by Jim Turley

Just over a year ago, we took a look at quantum dots, at least in the incarnation that Nanosys was giving them in smaller LCDs. Well, they’ve just announced a new process of applying to the dots to films so that they can be used to form larger screens – arbitrarily large, including TVs. They call the result Quantum Dot Enhancement Film (QDEF).

According to them, your colorful screen isn’t showing you nearly what it could be. By a … Read More → "Coming to a Screen Near You?"

Making Virtual Conferences Cool

by Jim Turley

Making Virtual Conferences Cool

Virtual events seem to be all the rage these days. This year, in my industry, a number of long-running events are now “going virtual”. Sponsors, event creators, and attendees are all dizzy with excitement about their transition to the 21st Century. I’ve even “attended” a few myself to see what all the buzz was about.

Now, I’m certainly no luddite. Obviously, since I run a company whose sole purpose is delivering technical content through new mediums, I’m no late adopter, either. I always … Read More →

Joining the Chorus

by Jim Turley

We’ve just been through ESC and are heading towards DAC. Both of these are “go-to” events for marketing: lots of announcements, lots of press meetings.

And yet, one of the recommendations you frequently hear as a marketer is that shows are a bad place to announce things. There’s so much going on, there are so many people making announcements, that you get lost in the noise. It’s really hard to stand out; your marketing energy is dissipated in friction, not in results. (Of course, if everybody stopped announcing at … Read More → "Joining the Chorus"

An Unambiguous Message for Multicore Architects

by Amelia Dalton

I had the good fun of co-moderating a panel with Multicore Association President Markus Levy at the Multicore Expo last week. The goal of the panel was to explore how software programmers who aren’t multicore architecture experts – and who don’t want to be – can write code that won’t have to be re-written for each multicore architecture variant that comes around. We were pushing our luck on the scheduling, since it was on the last day just after 4 PM. The exhibit booths were mostly down by then, and the chances were good … Read More → "An Unambiguous Message for Multicore Architects"

Veridae Proliferates

by Kevin Morris

Last fall we took a look at Veridae’s Clarus debug tool. At the time, it was positioned to handle SoCs and FPGAs, including multi-FPGA prototype boards.

So when they announced their Corus product at ESC, intended to cover FPGAs, I was confused. To be clear, I’m often confused, and I figured it was just me. But in talking more with Veridae, I found this to be one time when my brain wasn’t taking unpaid time off.

Having spent a lot of … Read More → "Veridae Proliferates"

Greater Certitude

by Kevin Morris

About two years ago, we looked at a new product from SpringSoft, Certitude, inherited through the acquisition of Certess. SpringSoft has just announced some improvements to the product.

As a quick reminder, Certitude performs what SpringSoft calls “functional qualification.” That fundamentally means that it looks for untestable pieces of your design by inserting bugs and seeing if the bugs can be detected.

Most of the improvements have to do with improving the specificity and relevance of what the analysis returns. First, they’ … Read More → "Greater Certitude"

Microsoft plus Skype?

by Kevin Morris

Microsoft just took Skype off eBay’s hands for the Buy It Now price of $8.5 billion. Yikes.

That’s a lot of money for a company that provides a free service. After all, the whole point of Skype is to use your computer to bypass the long-distance phone system. It’s like flipping a finger to The Man: I can use my $50/month Internet service to bypass the $3/minute phone system. Take that, AT&T! (Never mind that AT&T is providing many Skype users’ Internet service, too.)

Actually, Skype does make money. … Read More → "Microsoft plus Skype?"