November 13, 2012, A. Richard Newton Global Technology Leaders’ Conference, UC Berkeley—Dean Shankar Sastry of the UC Berkeley College of Engineering moderated a panel on engineering innovation by design. The panel members were Bernard Amadei from Engineers without Borders, Ana Claudia Arias from UCB, Carl Bass from AutoDesk, and Dale Dougherty from Maker Media. How…
November 13, 2012, A. Richard Newton Global Technology Leaders’ Conference, UC Berkeley—Carl Bass from Autodesk presented a view of engineering innovation by design. After a short video, he said that this is the best time to be an engineer. The potential for innovation now meets the access to markets, tools and money. There are three…
August 13, 2012, Display Search Emerging Display Technology Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Michelle Jones from TouchInternational described the process to develop and specify touch interfaces. This applies to users who plan to use fairly small numbers of units, in the 10-100k range. New touch developers need to identify the unique characteristics and requirements of their design….
April 12, 2012, Mentor User2User Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Wally Rhines from Mentor Graphics opened the conference with a talk on ” doing what others don’t” in his keynote address. Hs was trying to counter the conventional wisdom that in the EDA industry, the big companies continue and the small companies innovate, then get acquired. Mentor…
March 20, 2012, ISQED, Santa Clara, CA—Venu Menon from TI talked about the special needs for analog designs. Digital designs have long taken for granted the high levels of abstraction and automation available for design, something that the analog world is starting to address. To set the stage, the real world is captured and measured…
March 14, 2012, Common Platform Technology Forum, Santa Clara, CA—Juga Jagamather from IBM moderated a panel focused on future semiconductor innovations. The panel members were Michael Liehr from College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, Simon Segars from ARM, Subi Kargen from Global Foundries, TC Chen from IBM, and Dongwon Kim from Samsung. Low power? Chen…
August 18, 2011, Hot Chips 23 Conference, Stanford, CA—George Cox from Intel described the design for a digital random number generator (RNG). This building block is used for creating keys for cryptography and the higher the randomness, the better. To date, the highest randomness is entropy and the increasing need for security calls for something…
August 8, 2011, Hot Chips 23, Stanford, CA—Simon Seegars from ARM described the evolution of ARM processors and how they are now bringing high performance to mobile devices. Technology changes over time and the sometimes the changes bring pleasant surprises to consumers. Processors and technology have evolved tremendously over the last 30 years. We have…
May 4, 2011 – San Jose, CA—Meg Selfe, a vice president at IBM rational software presented “smarter by design: smarter products for a smarter planet”. Paying intelligence to the instrumented, informed world leads to innovation. The drivers for changes in embedded systems are new and emerging technologies, market needs, economics, and viability. CEOs participating in…
April 26, 2011, Mentor U2U, Santa Clara,CA—Wally Rhines described the dynamics of the design automation industry at the Mentor users’ group meeting. The EDA industry has fairly unique characteristics as a marketplace that seem to defy description and analysis. Mentor is growing and approaching $1B in total revenues. Some ask if EDA tracks industries like…