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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Fiji Dollar(FJD)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 0.6568 Fiji Dollar



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Euro(EUR)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 0.2657 Euro



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Egyptian Pound(EGP)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 4.537 Egyptian Pound



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Estonian Kroon(EEK)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 4.1577 Estonian Kroon



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Algerian Dinar(DZD)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 37.4116 Algerian Dinar



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Dominican Peso(DOP)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 16.045 Dominican Peso



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Danish Krone(DKK)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 2.0059 Danish Krone



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Czech Republic Koruna(CZK)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 7.3265 Czech Republic Koruna



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Costa Rican Colon(CRC)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 165.8525 Costa Rican Colon



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Colombian Peso(COP)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 1135.88 Colombian Peso



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Chinese Yuan Renminbi(CNY)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 2.0622 Chinese Yuan Renminbi



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Chilean Peso(CLP)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 240.7325 Chilean Peso



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Swiss Franc(CHF)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 0.2831 Swiss Franc



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Canadian Dollar(CAD)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 0.4086 Canadian Dollar



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Botswana Pula(BWP)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 3.5402 Botswana Pula



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Brazilian Real(BRL)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 1.6711 Brazilian Real



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Bolivian Boliviano(BOB)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 2.0102 Bolivian Boliviano



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Brunei Dollar(BND)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 0.412 Brunei Dollar



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Bahraini Dinar(BHD)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 0.1102 Bahraini Dinar



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Bulgarian Lev(BGN)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 0.5263 Bulgarian Lev



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Bangladeshi Taka(BDT)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 24.777 Bangladeshi Taka



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

ea

Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Australian Dollar(AUD)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 0.4461 Australian Dollar



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Argentine Peso(ARS)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 19.3777 Argentine Peso



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/Netherlands Antillean Guilder(ANG)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 0.5233 Netherlands Antillean Guilder



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

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Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)/United Arab Emirates Dirham(AED)

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 1.0708 United Arab Emirates Dirham



  • Papua New Guinean Kina

ea

Brunei Dollar(BND)/CFA Franc BCEAO(XOF)

1 Brunei Dollar = 428.0882 CFA Franc BCEAO




ea

Brunei Dollar(BND)/Sierra Leonean Leone(SLL)

1 Brunei Dollar = 6976.7771 Sierra Leonean Leone




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Brunei Dollar(BND)/Papua New Guinean Kina(PGK)

1 Brunei Dollar = 2.4273 Papua New Guinean Kina




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Brunei Dollar(BND)/New Zealand Dollar(NZD)

1 Brunei Dollar = 1.1528 New Zealand Dollar




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Brunei Dollar(BND)/South Korean Won(KRW)

1 Brunei Dollar = 863.1108 South Korean Won




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Brunei Dollar(BND)/Chilean Peso(CLP)

1 Brunei Dollar = 584.3256 Chilean Peso




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Brunei Dollar(BND)/Brazilian Real(BRL)

1 Brunei Dollar = 4.0562 Brazilian Real




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Brunei Dollar(BND)/Netherlands Antillean Guilder(ANG)

1 Brunei Dollar = 1.2703 Netherlands Antillean Guilder




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[Men's Basketball] Haskell Men's Basketball Defeat Nebraska Christian College




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[Men's Basketball] Haskell Has Two More Players Reach 1000 Career Points




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[Men's Basketball] A.I.I. Men's Basketball Conference Banquet News Release




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[Men's Basketball] Loss to No.3 Seed Lincoln College Ends Men's Basketballs Post Season Play




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Glory and Sadness, Beauty and Pain

X is a song written by Y and famously covered by Z. Time Magazine’s Josh Tyrangiel described it thus:

Y murmured the original like a dirge, but except for a single overwrought breath before the music kicks in, Z treated the 7-min. song like a tiny capsule of humanity, using his voice to careen between glory and sadness, beauty and pain, mostly just by repeating the word X. It’s not only Z’s best song — it’s one of the great songs, and because it covers so much emotional ground and is not (yet) a painfully obvious choice, it has become the go-to track whenever a TV show wants to create instant mood. ‘X can be joyous or bittersweet, depending on what part of it you use,’ says Sony ATV’s Kathy Coleman. ‘It’s one of those rare songs that the more it gets used, the more people want to use it.’

Name X, Y and Z.

Workoutable © 2007 IndiaUncut.com. All rights reserved.
India Uncut * The IU Blog * Rave Out * Extrowords * Workoutable * Linkastic




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Population Is Not a Problem, but Our Greatest Strength

This is the 21st installment of The Rationalist, my column for the Times of India.

When all political parties agree on something, you know you might have a problem. Giriraj Singh, a minister in Narendra Modi’s new cabinet, tweeted this week that our population control law should become a “movement.” This is something that would find bipartisan support – we are taught from school onwards that India’s population is a big problem, and we need to control it.

This is wrong. Contrary to popular belief, our population is not a problem. It is our greatest strength.

The notion that we should worry about a growing population is an intuitive one. The world has limited resources. People keep increasing. Something’s gotta give.

Robert Malthus made just this point in his 1798 book, An Essay on the Principle of Population. He was worried that our population would grow exponentially while resources would grow arithmetically. As more people entered the workforce, wages would fall and goods would become scarce. Calamity was inevitable.

Malthus’s rationale was so influential that this mode of thinking was soon called ‘Malthusian.’ (It is a pejorative today.) A 20th-century follower of his, Harrison Brown, came up with one of my favourite images on this subject, arguing that a growing population would lead to the earth being “covered completely and to a considerable depth with a writhing mass of human beings, much as a dead cow is covered with a pulsating mass of maggots.”

Another Malthusian, Paul Ehrlich, published a book called The Population Bomb in 1968, which began with the stirring lines, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Ehrlich was, as you’d guess, a big supporter of India’s coercive family planning programs. ““I don’t see,” he wrote, “how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.”

None of these fears have come true. A 2007 study by Nicholas Eberstadt called ‘Too Many People?’ found no correlation between population density and poverty. The greater the density of people, the more you’d expect them to fight for resources – and yet, Monaco, which has 40 times the population density of Bangladesh, is doing well for itself. So is Bahrain, which has three times the population density of India.

Not only does population not cause poverty, it makes us more prosperous. The economist Julian Simon pointed out in a 1981 book that through history, whenever there has been a spurt in population, it has coincided with a spurt in productivity. Such as, for example, between Malthus’s time and now. There were around a billion people on earth in 1798, and there are around 7.7 billion today. As you read these words, consider that you are better off than the richest person on the planet then.

Why is this? The answer lies in the title of Simon’s book: The Ultimate Resource. When we speak of resources, we forget that human beings are the finest resource of all. There is no limit to our ingenuity. And we interact with each other in positive-sum ways – every voluntary interactions leaves both people better off, and the amount of value in the world goes up. This is why we want to be part of economic networks that are as large, and as dense, as possible. This is why most people migrate to cities rather than away from them – and why cities are so much richer than towns or villages.

If Malthusians were right, essential commodities like wheat, maize and rice would become relatively scarcer over time, and thus more expensive – but they have actually become much cheaper in real terms. This is thanks to the productivity and creativity of humans, who, in Eberstadt’s words, are “in practice always renewable and in theory entirely inexhaustible.”

The error made by Malthus, Brown and Ehrlich is the same error that our politicians make today, and not just in the context of population: zero-sum thinking. If our population grows and resources stays the same, of course there will be scarcity. But this is never the case. All we need to do to learn this lesson is look at our cities!

This mistaken thinking has had savage humanitarian consequences in India. Think of the unborn millions over the decades because of our brutal family planning policies. How many Tendulkars, Rahmans and Satyajit Rays have we lost? Think of the immoral coercion still carried out on poor people across the country. And finally, think of the condescension of our politicians, asserting that people are India’s problem – but always other people, never themselves.

This arrogance is India’s greatest problem, not our people.



© 2007 IndiaUncut.com. All rights reserved.
India Uncut * The IU Blog * Rave Out * Extrowords * Workoutable * Linkastic




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DAC 2015 Cadence Theater – Learn from Customers and Partners

One reason for attending the upcoming Design Automation Conference (DAC 2015) is to learn about challenges other engineers have faced, and hear about their solutions. And the best place to do that is the Cadence Theater, located at the Cadence booth (#3515). The Theater will host continuous half-hour customer and partner presentations from 10:00 am Monday, June 8, to 5:30 pm Wednesday June 4.

As of this writing, 43 presentations are scheduled. This includes 17 customer presentations, 23 partner presentations, and 3 Cadence presentations, The presentations are open to all DAC attendees and no reservations are required.

Cadence customers who will be speaking include engineers from AMD, ams, Allegro Micro, Broadcom, IBM, Netspeed, NVidia, Renesas, Socionet, and STMicroelectronics. Partner presentations will be provided by ARM, Cliosoft, Dini Group, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Methodics, Methods2Business, National Instruments, Samsung, TowerJazz, TSMC, and X-Fab.

These informal presentations are given in an interactive setting with an opportunity for questions and answers. Audio recordings with slides will be available at the Cadence web site after DAC. To access recordings of the 2014 DAC Theater presentations, click here.

 

This Cadence DAC Theater presentation drew a large audience at DAC 2015

Here’s a listing of the currently scheduled Cadence DAC Theater presentations. The latest schedule is available at the Cadence DAC 2015 site.

Monday, June 8

 

Tuesday, June 9

 

Wednesday, June 10

 

In a Wednesday session (June 10, 10:00 am) at the theater, the Cadence Academic Network will sponsor three talks on academic/industry collaboration models. Speakers are Dr. Zhou Li, architect, Cadence; Prof. Xin Li, Carnegie-Mellon University; and Prof. Laleh Behjat, University of Calgary.

As shown above, there will be a giveaways for a set of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, an iPad Mini, and a GoPro Hero3 video camera.

See the Cadence Theater schedule for further details. And be sure to view our Multimedia Site for live blogging and photos and videos from DAC. For a complete overview of Cadence activities at DAC, see our DAC microsite.

Richard Goering

Related Blog Posts

DAC 2015: See the Latest in Semiconductor IP at “IPTalks!”

Cadence DAC 2015 and Denali Party Update

DAC 2015: Tackling Tough Design Problems Head On




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Cadence JasperGold Brings Formal Verification into Mainstream IC Verification Flows

Formal verification is a complex technology that has traditionally required experts or specialized teams who stood apart from the IC design and verification flow. Taking a different approach, a new release of the Cadence JasperGold formal verification platform (June 8, 2015) provides formal techniques that complement simulation, emulation, and debugging in the form of “Apps” or under-the-hood solutions that any design or verification engineer can use.

JasperGold was the initial (in fact only) product of Jasper Design Automation, acquired by Cadence in 2014. Jasper pioneered the formal Apps concept several years ago. While the company had previously sold JasperGold as a one-size-fits-all solution, Jasper began selling semi-automated JasperGold Apps that solved specific problems using formal analysis technology.

The new release is the next generation of JasperGold and will be available later this month. It includes three major improvements over previous Cadence and Jasper formal analysis offerings:

  • A unified Cadence Incisive and JasperGold formal verification platform delivers up to 15X performance gain over previous solutions.
  • JasperGold is integrated into the Cadence System Development Suite, where it provides formal-assisted simulation, emulation, and coverage. As a result, System Development Suite users can find bugs three months earlier than existing verification methods.
  • JasperGold’s formal analysis engines are integrated with the recently announced Indago debug platform, automating root cause analysis and on-the-fly, what-if exploration.

Best of Both Formal Verification Worlds

Taking advantage of technologies from both Cadence and Jasper, the new JasperGold represents a “best of both worlds” solution, according to Pete Hardee, product management director at Cadence. This solution combines technologies from the Cadence Incisive Enterprise Verifier and Incisive Formal Verifier with JasperGold formal analysis engines.

For example, to ease migration from Incisive formal tools, Cadence has integrated an Incisive common front end into the JasperGold apps platform. Jasper formal engines can run within the Incisive run-time environment. Cadence has also brought some selected Incisive formal engines into JasperGold.

As shown to the right, the JasperGold platform supports both the existing JasperGold front-end parser and the Incisive front-end parser. Hardee observed that this dual parser arrangement simplifies migration from Incisive formal tools to JasperGold, and provides a common compilation environment for people who want to use JasperGold with Incisive simulation. Further, the common run-time environment enables formal-assisted simulation.

The combination of JasperGold engines and Incisive engines supports two use models for formal analysis: formal proofs and bug hunting. In the first case, formal engines try all combinations of inputs without a testbench. The test is driven by formal properties written in languages such as SVA (SystemVerilog assertions) or PSL (Property Specification Language). Completion of a property is exhaustive proof that something can or cannot happen. This provides a “much stronger result” than simulation, Hardee said.

He also noted that formal analysis doesn’t necessarily require that all properties are completed. “You can get a lot of value even if proofs don’t complete,” he said. “Proofs that run deep enough to find bugs are just fine.”

Bug hunting involves random searches, and JasperGold bug hunting engines are very fast. However, these engines don’t necessarily use the most optimal path to get to a bug. So, Cadence engineers brought a constraint solver from Incisive and integrated it into JasperGold. “It looks at the constraints in the environment and gives you a better starting point,” Hardee said. “It takes more up-front time, but once you’ve done that the bug hunting engines can actually take a shorter path and find a bug a lot quicker.”

Another new JasperGold capability from the Incisive Formal Verifier is called “search pointing.” This uses simulation to penetrate deeply into the state space, and then kicks off a random formal search from a given point that you’ve reached in simulation. This technique makes it possible to find bugs that are very deep in the design.

It is probably clear by now that a number of different formal “engines” may be required to solve a given verification problem. Traditionally, a formal tool (or user) will farm a problem out to many engines and see which one works best. To put more intelligence into that process, Cadence launched the Trident “multi-cooperating engine” a couple of years ago. That has now been brought into JasperGold, where it helps “orchestrate” the engines according to what will work best for the design. This is a big part of the reason for the 15X speedup noted earlier in this post.

Integration with System Development Suite

The Cadence System Development Suite is an integrated set of hardware/software development and verification engines, including virtual prototyping, Incisive simulation, emulation, and FPGA-based prototyping. As shown below, JasperGold technology is integrated into the System Development Suite in several places, including formal-assisted debug, formal-assisted verification closure, formal-assisted simulation, formal-assisted emulation, and the Incisive vManager verification planning tool.

Formal-assisted emulation sounds like it should be easy, especially since Cadence has both accelerated verification IP (VIP) and assertion-based VIP. However, there’s a complication. Accelerated VIP represents less verification content than simulation VIP, because you have to remove many checkers to get VIP to compile on a Palladium emulator. That’s because the Palladium requires synthesizable code.

What you can do, however, is use assertion-based VIP in “snoop mode” as shown below. Assertion-based VIP coded in synthesizable SystemVerilog can replace the missing checkers in accelerated VIP. In this diagram, everything in the green box is running in the emulator and is thus completely accelerated.

 

Another example of formal-assisted emulation has to do with deep traces. As Hardee noted, emulation will produce very long traces, and it can be very difficult to find a point of interest in the trace and determine what caused an error. With formal-assisted emulation, users can find interesting events within the traces and create properties that mark them, so a debugger can find these events and trace back to the root cause.

Formal-assisted verification closure is available with the new JasperGold release. This is possible because you can use the vManager product to determine which tasks were completed by formal engines. It’s important information for verification managers who are not used to formal tools, Hardee noted.

Another aspect of formal-assisted verification closure is the JasperGold Unreachability Analysis (UNR) App, which can save simulation users weeks of time and effort. This App takes in the simulation coverage database and RTL, and automatically generates properties to explore coverage holes and determine if holes are reachable or unreachable. The App then generates an unreachable coverage point database. If the unreachable code does something useful, there’s a bug in the design or the testbench; if not, you don’t have to worry about it. The diagram below shows how it works.

Formal-Assisted Debugging

The third major component of the JasperGold announcement is the integration of formal analysis into the Indago debugging platform. As shown below, this platform has several apps, including the Indago Debug Analyzer. Two formal debug capabilities from the Jasper Visualize environment have been added to the the Indago Debug Analyzer:

  • Highlight Relevant Logic: This highlights the “cone of influence,” or the logic that is involved in reaching a given point
  • Why: This button highlights the immediate causes for a given event, and allows users to trace backwards in time

 

More formal capabilities will come with the Indago Advanced Debug Analyzer app, scheduled for release towards the end of 2015. This includes Quiet Trace, a Jasper capability that reduces trace activity to transactions relevant to an event. Also, a what-if analysis allows on-the-fly trace editing and recalculation to explore effects and sensitivities, without having to re-compile and re-execute the simulation.

Finally, Cadence has a Superlint flow that is now fully integrated with the JasperGold Visualize debugger. This two-tiered flow includes a basic lint capability as well as automated formal analysis based on the JasperGold Structural Property Synthesis app. “This could be a very good entry point for designers to start using formal,” Hardee said.

“Formal is taking off,” Hardee concluded. “People are no longer talking about return on investment for formal—they have established that. Now they’re supporting a proliferation of formal in their companies such that a wider set of people experience the benefit from that proven return on investment.”

Further information is available at the JasperGold Formal Verification Platform (Apps) page.

Richard Goering

Related Blog Posts

JUG Keynote—How Jasper Formal Verification Technology Fits into the Cadence Flow

Why Cadence Bought Jasper—A New Era in Formal Analysis

Q&A: An R&D Perspective on Formal Verification—Past, Present and Future




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EDA Retrospective: 30+ Years of Highlights and Lowlights, and What Comes Next

In 1985, as a relatively new editor at Computer Design magazine, I was asked to go forth and cover a new business called CAE (computer-aided engineering). I knew nothing about it, but I had been writing about design for test, so there seemed to be somewhat of a connection. Little did I know that “CAE” would turn into “EDA” and that I’d write about it for the next 30 years, for Computer Design, EE Times, Cadence, and a few others.

Now that I’m about to retire, I’m looking back over those 30 years. What a ride it has been! By the numbers I covered 31 Design Automation Conferences (DACs), hundreds of new products, dozens of acquisitions and startups, dozens of lawsuits, and some blind alleys that didn’t work out (like “silicon compilation”). Chip design went from gate arrays and PLDs with a few thousand gates to processors and SoCs with billions of transistors.

In 1985 there were three big CAE vendors – Daisy Systems, Mentor Graphics, and Valid Logic. All sold bundled packages that included workstations and CAE software; in fact, Daisy and Valid designed and manufactured their own workstations. In the early 1980s a workstation with schematic capture and gate-level logic simulation might have set you back $120,000. In 1985 OrCAD, now part of Cadence, came out with a $500 schematic capture package running on IBM PCs.

Cadence and Synopsys emerged in the late 1980s, and by the 1990s the EDA industry was pretty much a software-only business (apart from specialized machines like simulation accelerators). Since the early 1990s the “big three” EDA vendors have been Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor, giving the industry stability but allowing for competition and innovation.

Here, in my view, are some of the highlights that occurred during the past 30 years of EDA.

EDA is a Highlight

The biggest highlight in EDA is the existence of a commercial EDA industry! Marching hand in hand with the fabless semiconductor revolution, commercial EDA made it possible for hundreds of companies to design semiconductors, as opposed to a small handful that could afford large internal CAD operations and fabs. With hundreds of semiconductor companies as opposed to a half-dozen, there’s a lot more creativity, and you get the level of sophistication and intelligence that you see in your smartphone, video camera, tablet, gaming console, and car today.

CAE + CAD = EDA. This is not just a terminology issue. By the mid-1980s it became clear that front-end design (CAE) and physical design (CAD) belonged together. The big CAE vendors got involved in IC and PCB CAD, and presented increasingly integrated solutions. People got tired of writing “CAE/CAD” and “EDA” was born.

The move from gate-level design to RTL. This move happened around 1990, and in my view this is EDA’s primary technology success story during the past 30 years. Moving up in abstraction made the design and verification of much larger chips possible. Going from gate-level schematics to a hardware description language (HDL) revolutionized logic design and verification. Which would you rather do – draw all the gates that form an adder, or write a few lines of code and let a synthesis tool find an adder in your chosen technology?

Two developments made this shift in design possible. One was the emergence of commercial RTL synthesis (or “logic synthesis”) tools from Synopsys and other companies, which happened around 1990. Another was the availability of Verilog, developed by Gateway Design Automation and purchased by Cadence in 1989, as a standard RTL HDL. Although most EDA vendors at the time were pushing VHDL, designers wanted Verilog and that’s what most still use (with SystemVerilog coming on strong in the verification space).

IC functional verification underwent huge changes in the late 1990s and early 2000s, largely due to new technology developed by Verisity, which was acquired by Cadence in 2005. Before Verisity, verification engineers were writing and running directed tests in an ad-hoc manner. Verisity introduced or improved technologies such as pseudo-random test generation, coverage metrics, reusable verification IP, and semi-automated verification planning. The Verisity “e” language became a widely used hardware verification language (HVL).

The biggest way that EDA has expanded its focus has been through semiconductor IP. Today Synopsys and Cadence are leading providers in this area. Thanks to the availability of design and verification IP, many SoC designs today reuse as much as 80% of previous content. This makes it much, much faster to design the remaining portion. While IP began with fairly simple elements, today commercially available IP can include whole subsystems along with the software that runs on them. With IP, EDA vendors are providing not only design tools but design content.

Finally, the EDA industry has done an amazing job of keeping up with SoC complexity and with advanced process nodes. Thanks to intense and early collaboration between foundries, IP, and EDA providers, tools and IP have been ready for process nodes going down to 10nm.

Where Does ESL Fit?

In some ways, electronic system level (ESL) design is both a lowlight and a highlight. It’s a lowlight because people have been talking about it for 30 years and the acceptance and adoption have come very slowly. ESL is a highlight because it’s finally starting to happen, and its impact on design and verification flows could be dramatic. Still, ESL is vaguely defined and can be used to describe almost anything that happens at a higher abstraction level than RTL.

High-level synthesis (HLS) is an ESL technology that is seeing increasing use in production environments. Current HLS tools are not restricted to datapaths, and they produce RTL code that gives better quality of results than hand-written RTL. Another ESL methodology that’s catching on is virtual prototyping, which lets software developers write software pre-silicon using SystemC models. Both HLS and virtual prototyping are made possible by the standardization of SystemC and transaction-level modeling (TLM). However, it’s still not easy to use the same SystemC code for HLS and virtual prototyping.

And Now, Some Lowlights

Every new industry has some twists and turns, and EDA is no exception. For example, the EDA industry in the 1980s and 1990s sparked a lot of lawsuits. At EE Times my colleagues and I wrote a number of articles about EDA legal disputes, mostly about intellectual property, trade secrets, or patent issues. Over the past decade, fortunately, there have been far fewer EDA lawsuits than we had before the turn of the century.

Another issue that was troublesome in the 1980s and 1990s was so-called “standards wars.” These would occur as EDA vendors picked one side or the other in a standards dispute. For example, power intent formats were a point of conflict in the early 2000s, but the Common Power Format (CPF) and the Unified Power Format (UPF) are on the road to convergence today with the IEEE 1801 effort. As mentioned previously, Verilog and VHDL were competing for adoption in the early 1990s. For the most part, Verilog won, showing that the designer community makes the final decision about which standards will be used.

How on earth did there get to be something like 30 DFM (design for manufacturability) companies 10-12 years ago? To my knowledge, none of these companies are around today. A few were acquired, but most simply faded away. A lot of investors lost money. Today, VCs and angel investors are funding very few EDA or IP startups. There are fewer EDA startups than there used to be, and that’s too bad, because that’s where a lot of the innovation comes from.

Here’s another current lowlight -- not enough bright engineering or computer science students are joining EDA companies. They’re going to Google, Apple, Facebook, and the like. EDA is perceived as a mature industry that is still technically very difficult. We need to bring some excitement back into EDA.

Where Is EDA Headed?

Now we come to what you might call “headlights” and look at what’s coming. My list includes:

  • System Design Enablement. This term has been coined by Cadence to describe a focus on whole systems or end products including chips, packages, boards, embedded software, and mechanical components. There are far more systems companies than semiconductor companies, leaving a large untapped market that’s looking for solutions.
  • New frontiers for EDA. At a 2015 Design Automation Conference speech, analyst Gary Smith suggested that EDA can move into markets such as embedded software, mechanical CAD, biomedical, optics, and more.
  • Vertical markets. EDA has until now been “horizontal,” providing the same solution for all market segments. Going forward, markets like consumer, automotive, and industrial will have differing needs and will need optimized tools and IP.
  • Internet of Things. This is a current buzzword, but the impact on EDA remains uncertain. Many IoT devices will be heavily analog, use mature process nodes, and be dirt cheap. Lip-Bu Tan, Cadence CEO, recently pointed out that the silicon percentage of IoT revenue will be small and that a lot of the profits will be on the service side.

Moving On

For the past six years I’ve been writing the Industry Insights blog at Cadence.com. All things change, and with this post comes a farewell – I am retiring in late June and will be pursuing a variety of interests other than EDA. I’ll be watching, though, to see what happens next in this small but vital industry. Thanks for reading!

Richard Goering

 




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About using Liberate to create .lib for a cell with two separate outputs.

Hello, my name is Hsukang. I want to use Liberate to create a .lib file for the following circuit. This is a scan FF with two separate outputs.   The question is that no matter how I described its function, the synthesis tool said its a manformed scan FF.  Has anyone ever encountered anything like this?How should I describe the function correctly?I found that almost standard flip-flop cells are with only one output Q or have Qn at the same time. Does Liberate support scan flip-flop cells with two separate outputs ?

Thanks.





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Measuring Rapid IP3

In the world of analog design, IP3—the third order intercept point, is a known parameter that is used to measure the linearity in the radio frequency (RF) components. The extracted IP3 values are very essential to determine the operating power ...(read more)




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Triple Beat Analysis: What, Why & How?

The Triple Beat analysis is similar to Rapid IP2/IP3 analysis except that it uses three tones instead of two. It is used in cases where two closely-spaced small-signal inputs from a transmitter leak in to the receiver along with an intended small-signal RF input signal. (read more)




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Measurement of Phase Noise in Oscillators

The other day, I happened to sneak out some time for myself after having sent the kids to play in the neighborhood park. I made myself a hot cup of coffee and settled on the couch hoping to enjoy the silence in the house. But was it really ...(read more)




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hiCreateAppForm with scrollbars and attachmentList

Hello,

I have created an appForm with  the following attachmentList and size:

?attachmentList list(hicLeftPositionSet | hicRightPositionSet ; field 1
                     hicLeftPositionSet | hicRightPositionSet ; field 2
etc.

?initialSize    800:800
?minSize        800:800
?maxSize       1600:800

If I reduce the minimum y-size (?minSize        800:200), scrollbars are not inserted, unless I remove the attachmentList constraints.

Is it possible to have both scrollbars and "hicLeftPositionSet | hicRightPositionSet"? 

Thank you,

Best regards,

Aldo




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Create the title & frame for view schematic

Hi all,

I want to write a script SKILL to create the title & frame for view schematic. My question is whether SKILL supports any function for me to do this.

Best regards,

Huy Hoang




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skill ocean: how to get instances of type hisim_hv from simulation results?

Hi there,

I'm running a transient simulation, and I want to get all instances with model implementation hisim_hv because after that I want to process the data and to adjust some parameters for this kind of devices before dumping the values.

What is the easiest/fastest way to get those instances in skill/ocean?

What I did until now: 

- save the final OP of the simulation and then in skill

openResults()
selectResults('tranOp)
report(?type "hisim_hv" ?param "vgs")

Output seems to be promising, and looks like I can redirect it to a file and after that I have to parse the file.

Is there other simple way? I mean to not save data to file and to parse it.

Eventually having an instance name, is it possible to get the model implementation (hsim_hv, bsim4, etc..)? 

Best Regards,

Marcel




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When Arm meets Intel – Overcoming the Challenges of Merging Architectures on an SoC to Enable Machine Learning

As the stakes for winning server segment market share grow ever higher an increasing number of companies are seeking to grasp the latest Holy Grail of multi-chip coherence. The approach promises to better enable applications such as machine learning...(read more)