Ottawa, Kansas - The Haskell Indian Nations University Men's track and field teams competed at the Ottawa Braves Invitational on Saturday.

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 1.2257 Polish Zloty

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 3.5402 Botswana Pula

1 Brunei Dollar = 2.9752 Polish Zloty

1 Brunei Dollar = 8.5931 Botswana Pula

USB4 can simultaneously tunnel USB3, PCIe and DisplayPort native protocol traffic through a hierarchy of USB4 routers. The key to tunneling of these protocols is routing table programmed at each ingress adapter. An entry of a routing table maps an incoming HopID, called Input/Ingress HopID to a corresponding pair of Output/Egress Adapter and Egress/Output HopID.

The responsibility of programming routing tables lies with the Connection Manager. Connection Manager, having the complete view of the hierarchy of the routers, programs the routing tables at all relevant adapter ports. Accordingly, the USB3, PCIe and DisplayPort protocol tunneled packets are routed, and reach their respective intended destinations.

The diagrammatic representation below is an example of tunneling of USB3 protocol traffic from USB4 Host Router to USB4 Peripheral Device Router through a USB4 Hub Router. The path from USB3 Host to USB3 Device is depicted by routing tables indicated at A -> B -> C -> D, and the one from USB3 Device to USB3 Host by routing tables indicated at E -> F -> G -> H . Note that the Input HopID from and Output HopID to all three protocol adapters for USB3, PCIe and DisplayPort Aux traffic, are fixed as 8, and for DisplayPort Main Link traffic are fixed as 9.

Once the native protocol traffic come into the transport layer of a USB4 router, the transport layer of it does not know to which native protocol a tunneled packet belongs to. The only way a transport layer tunneled packet is routed through the hierarchy of the routers is using the HopID values and the information programmed in the routing tables.

The figure below shows an example of tunneling of all the three USB3, PCIe and DisplayPort protocol traffic together. The transport layer tunneled packets of each of these native protocols are transported simultaneously through the routers hierarchy.

 Cadence has a mature Verification IP solution for the verification of USB3, PCIe and DisplayPort tunneling. This solution also employs the industry proven VIPs of each of these native protocols for native USB3, PCIe and DisplayPort traffic.

Verifying lane adapter state machine in a router design is quite an involved task and needs verification from several aspects including that for its link training functionality.

The diagram below shows two lane adapters connected to each other and each going through the link training process. Each training sub-state transition is contingent on conditions for both transmission and reception of relevant ordered sets needed for a transition. Until conditions for both are satisfied an adapter cannot transition to the next training sub-state.

As deduced from the lane adapter state machine section of USB4 specification, the reception condition for the next training sub-state transition is less strict than that of the transmission condition. For ex., for LOCK1 to LOCK2 transition, the reception condition requires only two SLOS symbols in a row being detected, while the transmission condition requires at least four complete SLOS1 ordered sets to be sent.

From the above conditions in the specification, it is a possibility that a lane adapter A may detect the two SLOS or TS ordered sets, being sent by the lane adapter B on the other end, in the very beginning as soon as it starts transmitting its own SLOS or TS ordered sets. On the other hand, it is also a possibility that these SLOS or TS ordered sets are not yet detected by lane adapter A even when it has met the condition of sending minimum number of SLOS or TS ordered sets.

In such a case, lane adapter A, even though it has satisfied the transmission condition cannot transition to the next sub-state because the reception condition is not yet met. Hence lane adapter A must first wait for the required number of ordered sets to be detected by it before it can go to the next sub-state. But this wait cannot be endless as there are timeouts defined in the specification, after which the training process may be re-attempted.

This interlocked way of operation also ensures that state machine of a lane adapter does not go out of sync with that of the other lane adapter. Such type of scenarios can occur whenever lane adapter state machine transitions to the training state from other states.

Cadence has a mature Verification IP solution for the verification of various aspects of the logical layer of a USB4 router design, with verification capabilities provided to do a comprehensive verification of it.

This is the 15th installment of The Rationalist, my column for the Times of India.

It’s election season, and promises are raining down on voters like rose petals on naïve newlyweds. Earlier this week, the Congress party announced a minimum income guarantee for the poor. This Friday, the Modi government released a budget full of sops. As the days go by, the promises will get bolder, and you might feel important that so much attention is being given to you. Well, the joke is on you.

Every election, HL Mencken once said, is “an advance auction sale of stolen goods.” A bunch of competing mafias fight to rule over you for the next five years. You decide who wins, on the basis of who can bribe you better with your own money. This is an absurd situation, which I tried to express in a limerick I wrote for this page a couple of years ago:

POLITICS: A neta who loves currency notes/ Told me what his line of work denotes./ ‘It is kind of funny./ We steal people’s money/And use some of it to buy their votes.’

We’re the dupes here, and we pay far more to keep this circus going than this circus costs. It would be okay if the parties, once they came to power, provided good governance. But voters have given up on that, and now only want patronage and handouts. That leads to one of the biggest problems in Indian politics: We are stuck in an equilibrium where all good politics is bad economics, and vice versa.

For example, the minimum guarantee for the poor is good politics, because the optics are great. It’s basically Garibi Hatao: that slogan made Indira Gandhi a political juggernaut in the 1970s, at the same time that she unleashed a series of economic policies that kept millions of people in garibi for decades longer than they should have been.

This time, the Congress has released no details, and keeping it vague makes sense because I find it hard to see how it can make economic sense. Depending on how they define ‘poor’, how much income they offer and what the cost is, the plan will either be ineffective or unworkable.

The Modi government’s interim budget announced a handout for poor farmers that seemed rather pointless. Given our agricultural distress, offering a poor farmer 500 bucks a month seems almost like mockery.

Such condescending handouts solve nothing. The poor want jobs and opportunities. Those come with growth, which requires structural reforms. Structural reforms don’t sound sexy as election promises. Handouts do.

A classic example is farm loan waivers. We have reached a stage in our politics where every party has to promise them to assuage farmers, who are a strong vote bank everywhere. You can’t blame farmers for wanting them – they are a necessary anaesthetic. But no government has yet made a serious attempt at tackling the root causes of our agricultural crisis.

Why is it that Good Politics in India is always Bad Economics? Let me put forth some possible reasons. One, voters tend to think in zero-sum ways, as if the pie is fixed, and the only way to bring people out of poverty is to redistribute. The truth is that trade is a positive-sum game, and nations can only be lifted out of poverty when the whole pie grows. But this is unintuitive.

Two, Indian politics revolves around identity and patronage. The spoils of power are limited – that is indeed a zero-sum game – so you’re likely to vote for whoever can look after the interests of your in-group rather than care about the economy as a whole.

Three, voters tend to stay uninformed for good reasons, because of what Public Choice economists call Rational Ignorance. A single vote is unlikely to make a difference in an election, so why put in the effort to understand the nuances of economics and governance? Just ask, what is in it for me, and go with whatever seems to be the best answer.

Four, Politicians have a short-term horizon, geared towards winning the next election. A good policy that may take years to play out is unattractive. A policy that will win them votes in the short term is preferable.

Sadly, no Indian party has shown a willingness to aim for the long term. The Congress has produced new Gandhis, but not new ideas. And while the BJP did make some solid promises in 2014, they did not walk that talk, and have proved to be, as Arun Shourie once called them, UPA + Cow. Even the Congress is adopting the cow, in fact, so maybe the BJP will add Temple to that mix?

Benjamin Franklin once said, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.” This election season, my friends, the people of India are on the menu. You have been deveined and deboned, marinated with rhetoric, seasoned with narrative – now enter the oven and vote.

© 2007 IndiaUncut.com. All rights reserved.
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This is the 16th installment of The Rationalist, my column for the Times of India.

Steven Pinker, in his book Enlightenment Now, relates an old Russian joke about two peasants named Boris and Igor. They are both poor. Boris has a goat. Igor does not. One day, Igor is granted a wish by a visiting fairy. What will he wish for?

“I wish,” he says, “that Boris’s goat should die.”

The joke ends there, revealing as much about human nature as about economics. Consider the three things that happen if the fairy grants the wish. One, Boris becomes poorer. Two, Igor stays poor. Three, inequality reduces. Is any of them a good outcome?

I feel exasperated when I hear intellectuals and columnists talking about economic inequality. It is my contention that India’s problem is poverty – and that poverty and inequality are two very different things that often do not coincide.

To illustrate this, I sometimes ask this question: In which of the following countries would you rather be poor: USA or Bangladesh? The obvious answer is USA, where the poor are much better off than the poor of Bangladesh. And yet, while Bangladesh has greater poverty, the USA has higher inequality.

Indeed, take a look at the countries of the world measured by the Gini Index, which is that standard metric used to measure inequality, and you will find that USA, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Kingdom all have greater inequality than Bangladesh, Liberia, Pakistan and Sierra Leone, which are much poorer. And yet, while the poor of Bangladesh would love to migrate to unequal USA, I don’t hear of too many people wishing to go in the opposite direction.

Indeed, people vote with their feet when it comes to choosing between poverty and inequality. All of human history is a story of migration from rural areas to cities – which have greater inequality.

If poverty and inequality are so different, why do people conflate the two? A key reason is that we tend to think of the world in zero-sum ways. For someone to win, someone else must lose. If the rich get richer, the poor must be getting poorer, and the presence of poverty must be proof of inequality.

But that’s not how the world works. The pie is not fixed. Economic growth is a positive-sum game and leads to an expansion of the pie, and everybody benefits. In absolute terms, the rich get richer, and so do the poor, often enough to come out of poverty. And so, in any growing economy, as poverty reduces, inequality tends to increase. (This is counter-intuitive, I know, so used are we to zero-sum thinking.) This is exactly what has happened in India since we liberalised parts of our economy in 1991.

Most people who complain about inequality in India are using the wrong word, and are really worried about poverty. Put a millionaire in a room with a billionaire, and no one will complain about the inequality in that room. But put a starving beggar in there, and the situation is morally objectionable. It is the poverty that makes it a problem, not the inequality.

You might think that this is just semantics, but words matter. Poverty and inequality are different phenomena with opposite solutions. You can solve for inequality by making everyone equally poor. Or you could solve for it by redistributing from the rich to the poor, as if the pie was fixed. The problem with this, as any economist will tell you, is that there is a trade-off between redistribution and growth. All redistribution comes at the cost of growing the pie – and only growth can solve the problem of poverty in a country like ours.

It has been estimated that in India, for every one percent rise in GDP, two million people come out of poverty. That is a stunning statistic. When millions of Indians don’t have enough money to eat properly or sleep with a roof over their heads, it is our moral imperative to help them rise out of poverty. The policies that will make this possible – allowing free markets, incentivising investment and job creation, removing state oppression – are likely to lead to greater inequality. So what? It is more urgent to make sure that every Indian has enough to fulfil his basic needs – what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in his fine book On Inequality, called the Doctrine of Sufficiency.

The elite in their airconditioned drawing rooms, and those who live in rich countries, can follow the fashions of the West and talk compassionately about inequality. India does not have that luxury.

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

This is the 17th installment of The Rationalist, my column for the Times of India.

One of my favourite English words comes from chess. If it is your turn to move, but any move you make makes your position worse, you are in ‘Zugzwang’. Narendra Modi was in zugzwang after the Pulwama attacks a few days ago—as any Indian prime minister in his place would have been.

An Indian PM, after an attack for which Pakistan is held responsible, has only unsavoury choices in front of him. He is pulled in two opposite directions. One, strategy dictates that he must not escalate. Two, politics dictates that he must.

Let’s unpack that. First, consider the strategic imperatives. Ever since both India and Pakistan became nuclear powers, a conventional war has become next to impossible because of the threat of a nuclear war. If India escalates beyond a point, Pakistan might bring their nuclear weapons into play. Even a limited nuclear war could cause millions of casualties and devastate our economy. Thus, no matter what the provocation, India needs to calibrate its response so that the Pakistan doesn’t take it all the way.

It’s impossible to predict what actions Pakistan might view as sufficient provocation, so India has tended to play it safe. Don’t capture territory, don’t attack military assets, don’t kill civilians. In other words, surgical strikes on alleged terrorist camps is the most we can do.

Given that Pakistan knows that it is irrational for India to react, and our leaders tend to be rational, they can ‘bleed us with a thousand cuts’, as their doctrine states, with impunity. Both in 2001, when our parliament was attacked and the BJP’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee was PM, and in 2008, when Mumbai was attacked and the Congress’s Manmohan Singh was PM, our leaders considered all the options on the table—but were forced to do nothing.

But is doing nothing an option in an election year?

Leave strategy aside and turn to politics. India has been attacked. Forty soldiers have been killed, and the nation is traumatised and baying for blood. It is now politically impossible to not retaliate—especially for a PM who has criticized his predecessor for being weak, and portrayed himself as a 56-inch-chested man of action.

I have no doubt that Modi is a rational man, and knows the possible consequences of escalation. But he also knows the possible consequences of not escalating—he could dilute his brand and lose the elections. Thus, he is forced to act. And after he acts, his Pakistan counterpart will face the same domestic pressure to retaliate, and will have to attack back. And so on till my home in Versova is swallowed up by a nuclear crater, right?

Well, not exactly. There is a way to resolve this paradox. India and Pakistan can both escalate, not via military actions, but via optics.

Modi and Imran Khan, who you’d expect to feel like the loneliest men on earth right now, can find sweet company in each other. Their incentives are aligned. Neither man wants this to turn into a full-fledged war. Both men want to appear macho in front of their domestic constituencies. Both men are masters at building narratives, and have a pliant media that will help them.

Thus, India can carry out a surgical strike and claim it destroyed a camp, killed terrorists, and forced Pakistan to return a braveheart prisoner of war. Pakistan can say India merely destroyed two trees plus a rock, and claim the high moral ground by returning the prisoner after giving him good masala tea. A benign military equilibrium is maintained, and both men come out looking like strong leaders: a win-win game for the PMs that avoids a lose-lose game for their nations. They can give themselves a high-five in private when they meet next, and Imran can whisper to Modi, “You’re a good spinner, bro.”

There is one problem here, though: what if the optics don’t work?

If Modi feels that his public is too sceptical and he needs to do more, he might feel forced to resort to actual military escalation. The fog of politics might obscure the possible consequences. If the resultant Indian military action causes serious damage, Pakistan will have to respond in kind. In the chain of events that then begins, with body bags piling up, neither man may be able to back down. They could end up as prisoners of circumstance—and so could we.

***

Also check out:

Why Modi Must Learn to Play the Game of Chicken With Pakistan—Amit Varma
The Two Pakistans—Episode 79 of The Seen and the Unseen
India in the Nuclear Age—Episode 80 of The Seen and the Unseen

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

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

Design and verification standards are critical if we want to get a new generation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices into the market, according to panelists at an Accellera Systems Initiative breakfast at the Design Automation Conference (DAC 2015) June 9. However, IoT devices for different vertical markets pose very different challenges and requirements, making the standards picture extremely complicated.

The panel was titled “Design and Verification Standards in the Era of IoT.” It was moderated by industry editor John Blyler, CEO of JB Systems Media and Technology. Panelists were as follows, shown left to right in the photo below:

• Lu Dai, director of engineering, Qualcomm
• Wael William Diab, senior director for strategy marketing, industry development and standardization, Huawei
• Chris Rowen, CTO, IP Group, Cadence Design Systems, Inc.

In opening remarks, Blyler recalled a conversation from the recent IEEE International Microwave Symposium in which a panelist pointed to the networking and application layers as the key problem areas for RF and wireless standardization. Similarly, in the IoT space, we need to look “higher up” at the systems level and consider both software and hardware development, Blyler said.

Rowen helped set some context for the discussion by noting three important points about IoT:

• IoT is not a product segment. Vertical product segments such as automotive, medical devices, and home automation all have very different characteristics.
• IoT “devices” are components within a hierarchy of systems that includes sensors, applications, user interface, gateway application (such as cell phone), and finally the cloud, where all data is aggregated.
• A bifurcation is taking place in design. We are going from extreme scale SoCs to “extreme fit” SoCs that are specialized, low energy, and very low cost.

Here are some of the questions and answers that were addressed during the panel discussion.

Q: The claim was recently made that given the level of interaction between sensors and gateways, 50X more verification nodes would have to be checked for IoT. What standards need to be enhanced or changed to accomplish that?

Rowen: That’s a huge number of design dimensions, and the way you attack a problem of that scale is by modularization. You define areas that are protected and encapsulated by standards, and you prove that individual elements will be compliant with that interface. We will see that many interesting problems will be in the software layers.

Q: Why is standardization so important for IoT?

Dai: A company that is trying to make a lot of chips has to deal with a variety of standards. If you have to deal with hundreds of standards, it’s a big bottleneck for bringing your products to market. If you have good standardization within the development process of the IC, that helps time to market.

When I first joined Qualcomm a few years ago, there was no internal verification methodology. When we had a new hire, it took months to ramp up on our internal methodology to become effective. Then came UVM [Universal Verification Methodology], and as UVM became standard, we reduced our ramp-up time tremendously. We’ve seen good engineers ramp up within days.

Diab: When we start to look at standards, we have to do a better job of understanding how they’re all going to play with each other. I don’t think one set of standards can solve the IoT problem. Some standards can grow vertically in markets like industrial, and other standards are getting more horizontal. Security is very important and is probably one thing that goes horizontally.

Requirements for verticals may be different, but processing capability, latency, bandwidth, and messaging capability are common [horizontal] concerns. I think a lot of standards organizations this year will work on horizontal slices [of IoT].

Q: IoT interoperability is important. Any suggestions for getting that done and moving forward?

Rowen: The interoperability problem is that many of these [IoT] devices are wireless. Wireless is interesting because it is really hard – it’s not like a USB plug. Wireless lacks the infrastructure that exists today around wired standards. If we do things in a heavily wireless way, there will be major barriers to overcome.

Dai: There are different standards for 4G LTE technology for different [geographical] markets. We have to make a chip that can work for 20 or 30 wireless technologies, and the cost for that is tremendous. The U.S., Europe, and China all have different tweaks. A good standard that works across the globe would reduce the cost a lot.

Q: If we’re talking about the need to define requirements, a good example to look at is power. Certainly you have UPF [Unified Power Format] for the chip, board, and module.

Rowen: There is certainly a big role for standards about power management. But there is also a domain in which we’re woefully under-equipped, and that is the ability to accurately model the different power usage scenarios at the applications level. Too often power devolves into something that runs over thousands of cycles to confirm that you can switch between power management levels successfully. That’s important, but it tells you very little about how much power your system is going to dissipate.

Dai: There are products that claim to be UPF compliant, but my biggest problem with my most recent chip was still with UPF. These tools are not necessarily 100% UPF compliant.

One other concern I have is that I cannot get one simulator to pass my Verilog code and then go to another that will pass. Even though we have a lot of tools, there is no certification process for a language standard.

Q: When we create a standard, does there need to be a companion compliance test?

Rowen: I think compliance is important. Compliance is being able to prove that you followed what you said you would follow. It also plays into functional safety requirements, where you need to prove you adhered to the flow.

Dai: When we [Qualcomm] sell our 4G chips, we have to go through a lot of certifications. It’s often a differentiating factor.

Q: For IoT you need power management and verification that includes analog. Comments?

Rowen: Small, cheap sensor nodes tend to be very analog-rich, lower scale in terms of digital content, and have lots of software. Part of understanding what’s different about standardization is built on understanding what’s different about the design process, and what does it mean to have a software-rich and analog-rich world.

Dai: Analog is important in this era of IoT. Analog needs to come into the standards community.

Richard Goering

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EDA investor and former executive Jim Hogan is optimistic about automotive electronics, but he has some concerns as well. At the recent Design Automation Conference (DAC 2015), he delivered a speech titled “The Looming Quality, Reliability, and Safety Crisis in Automotive Electronics...Why is it and what can we do to avoid it?"

Hogan gave the keynote speech for IP Talks!, a series of over 30 half-hour presentations located at the ChipEstimate.com booth. Presenters included ARM, Cadence, eSilicon, Kilopass, Sidense, SilabTech, Sonics, Synopsys, True Circuits, and TSMC. Held in an informal setting, the talks addressed the challenges faced by SoC design teams and showed how the latest developments in semiconductor IP can contribute to design success.

Jim Hogan delivers keynote speech at DAC 2015 IP Talks!

Hogan talked about several phases of automotive electronics. These include assisted driving to avoid collisions, controlled automation of isolated tasks such as parallel parking, and, finally, fully autonomous vehicles, which Hogan expects to see in 15 to 20 years. The top immediate priorities for automotive electronics designers, he said, will be government regulation, fuel economy, advanced safety, and infotainment.

More Code than a Boeing 777

According to Hogan, today’s automobiles use 50-100 microcontrollers per car, resulting in a worldwide automotive semiconductor market of around $40 billion. The global market for advanced automotive electronics is expected to reach $240 billion by 2020. Software is growing faster in the automotive market than it is in smartphones. Hogan quoted a Ford vice president who observed that there are more lines of code in a Ford Fusion car than a Boeing 777 airplane.

One unique challenge for automotive electronics designers is long-term reliability. This is because a typical U.S. car stays on the road for 15 years, Hogan said. Americans are holding onto new vehicles for a record 71.4 months.

Another challenge is regulatory compliance. Aeronautics is highly regulated from manufacturing to air traffic control, and the same will probably be true of automated cars. Hogan speculated that the Department of Transportation will be the regulatory authority for autonomous cars. Today, automotive electronics providers must comply with the ISO26262 automotive functional safety specification.

So where do we go from here? “We’ve got to change our mindset,” Hogan said. “We’ve got to focus on safety and reliability and demand a different kind of engineering discipline.” You can watch Hogan’s entire presentation by clicking on the video icon below, or clicking here. You can also watch other IP Talks! videos from DAC 2015 here.

https://youtu.be/qL4kAEu-PNw

Richard Goering

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

Automotive Functional Safety Drives New Chapter in IC Verification

Hi,

I'm a newbie and I'm working on a mixed-signal chip in Innovus. I've got a few analog LEF files that I've imported into my floorplan as macros.

My chip has got two power domains - VCC and VBAT.

One of the macro in the VBAT domain uses VBAT and GND as power rails myloweslife.com.

On doing Special-Route, I've got a lot of minute power rails for the standard cells, as expected.

But, the VBAT power rails are not getting extended till the outer power rings. Only the GND rails are correctly getting extended till the outer power rings.

A screen shot is attached for reference.

Thanks for any help

Hi,

I'm a newbie and I'm working on a mixed-signal chip in Innovus. I've got a few analog LEF files that I've imported into my floorplan as macros.

My chip has got two power domains - VCC and VBAT.

One of the macro in the VBAT domain uses VBAT and GND as power rails KrogerFeedback.com.

On doing Special-Route, I've got a lot of minute power rails for the standard cells, as expected.

But, the VBAT power rails are not getting extended till the outer power rings. Only the GND rails are correctly getting extended till the outer power rings.

A screen shot is attached for reference.

Thanks for any help

Hello, I am using Encounter 8.1. My mouse is working fine, but my keyboard is not working well in Encounter. I can type in some boxes, but in many boxes I cannot type. The binding key is also not responding. How do I fix this issue? Thanks.

For a netlist vs. netlist LEC flow we have to solve the following problem:

- in the RTL code we replicate a large array of N x M all-identical hard-macros, let call them MACRO_A

- MACRO_A is pre-assembled in Innovus and contains digital parts and analog parts (bottom-up hierarchical flow)

- at top-level (full-chip) we instantiate this array of all-identical macros

- in the top-level place-and-route flow we perform ecoChangeCell to remaster the top row of this array with MACRO_B

- MACRO_B is just a copy of the original MACRO_A cell containing same pins position, same internal digital functionality and also same digital layout, only slight differences in one analog block inside the macro

- MACRO_A and MACRO_B have the same .lib file generated with the do_extract_model command at the end of the Innovus flow, they only differ in the name of the macro

- when performing post-synthesis netlist vs post-place-and-route we load .lib files of both macros in Conformal LEC

- the LEC flow fails because Conformal LEC sees only MACRO_A instantiated in the post-synthesis netlist and both MACRO_A and MACRO_B in the post-palce-and-route netlist

Since both digital functionality and STD cells layout are the same between MACRO_A and MACRO_B we don't want to keep track of this difference already at RTL stage, we just want to perform this ECO change in place-and-route and force Conformal to assume equivalence between MACRO_A and MACRO_B .

Basically what I'm searching for is something similar to the add_instance_equivalences Conformal command but that works between Golden and Revised designs on cell primitives/black-boxes .

Is this flow supported ?

Thanks in advance

Luca

I have been working on a an ASA 17.2 project for the last 6 months.

When I go to Project --> Settings, the settings window does not open. 

The tool indicates that a window is open, as I cannot click on anything else in the project. But it does not show the Settings window.

This has been happening only for the last 2 months. Before that it was working fine.

If I send the project to my colleague, the settings window shows up for him.

It's been a while since you've heard from me...it has been a busy year for sure. One of the reasons I've been so quiet is that I was part of a team working diligently on our latest best kept secret: The MMSIM 12.1.1/MMSIM 13.1 Documentation has...(read more)

Did you check out the new Pnoise and Hbnoise Choosing Analyses forms in the MMSIM 15.1 and IC6.1.7 /ICADV12.2 releases? These forms have been significantly improved and simplified. The Direct Plot Form has also been enhanced and is much easy to use....(read more)

Large-signal S-parameters (LSSPs) are an extension of small-signal S-parameters and are defined as the ratio of reflected (or transmitted) waves to incident waves. (read more)

Hi,

I am trying to write a skill code where it takes form inputs by default and just displays tree directly.

i have written below code,

procedure( create_tree()
let(()

leHiTree()
leTreeForm->treeOption->value="Current to user level"
leTreeForm->userLevel->value= 31
ipcSleep(1)
hiFormDone(leTreeForm)

))

the form takes in values but it is not closing.

tried with regtimer in place of ipc sleep, didn't work.

how to close form(should be same as pressing OK)? 

Thanks in advance,

vishwas 

Inside the scope of isCallable there is code which I don't want to be executed.

The procedure named in isCallable to-day is callable.

I want to make that procedure so it cannot be called.  How do I do that?

I can't change the isCallable line or the scope.  I want to change its behavior by making sure that the procedure does not exist (obviously this would be done before the code is executed).

When I place a pcell and do not change the W parameter (default is used) the value is not saved in the OA cell property.

When I change the default value of the super master now, the old pcell will get the new default value automatically because there is nothing saved inside the OA cell for this parameter.

Do you have any Idea, that how we can save the default values in the OA cell properties so that this value doesn't get updated if the default values are updated in the new PDKs

CDNLive is a user conference, and verification is one of the largest categories of content with multiple tracks covering multiple days. Portable stimulus is one of the hottest new areas in verification, and continues to be popular in all venues. At l...(read more)

Learn about the challenges and solutions for integrating and verification PCIe(r) Gen4 into an Arm-Based Server SoC. Listen to this relatively short webinar by Arm and Cadence, as they describe the collaboration and results, including methodology and...(read more)

Vegas, here we come. All of us fun EDA engineers at once. Be prepared, next week’s Design Automation Conference will be busy! The trends I had outlined after last DAC in 2018—system design, cloud, and machine learning—have...(read more)

Hi, I want to add values to components in my SiP design such as 1nF or 15nH. There is already in existence a COMP_VALUE property reserved for this as shown during BOM generation. This property is not visible under the Edit/Properties dialog for component or symbol find filters. We have already created user properties called COMP_MFG and COMP_MFG_PN that it editable at a component level. When we try to add COMP_VALUE it is reported as a reserved name in Cadence but this name is not listed in the properties dialog. Is there a way to turn on the visibility and editablility of this or other hidden reserved Cadence property names? How can I assign a string value to the COMP_VALUE property?

Thanks

The Linley Processor Conference always opens with a keynote by Linley Gwenapp giving an overview of processors in whatever is the hottest area. Most of the other presentations during the conference...

[[ Click on the title to access the full blog on the Cadence Community site. ]]

Autonomous vehicles are coming. In a statistic from the U.S. Department of Transportation, about 37,000 people died in car accidents in the United States in 2018. Having safe, fully automatic vehicles could drastically reduce that number—but the trick is figuring out how to make an autonomous vehicle safe. Internet-enabled systems in cars are more common than ever, and it’s unlikely that the use of them will slow or stop—and while they provide many conveniences to a driver, they also represent another attack surface that a potential criminal could use to disable a vehicle while driving.

So—what’s being done to combat this? Green Hills Software is on the case, and they explained the landscape of security in automotive systems in a presentation given by Max Hinson in the Cadence Theater at DAC 2019. They have software embedded [FS1] in most parts of a car, and all the major OEMs use their tech. The challenge they’ve taken on is far from a simple one—between the sheer complexity of modern automotive computer systems, safety requirements like the ISO 26262 standard, and the cost to develop and deploy software, they’ve got their work cut out for them. It’s the complexity of the systems that represents the biggest challenge, though. The autonomous cars of the future have dynamic behaviors, cognitive networks, require security certification to at least ASIL-D, require cyber security like you’d have on an important regular computer system to cover for the internet-enabled systems—and all of this comes with a caveat: under current verification abilities, it’s not possible to test every test case for the autonomous system. You’d be looking at trillions of test cases to reach full coverage—not even the strongest emulation units can cover that today.

With regular cars, you could do testing with crash-test dummies, and ramming the car into walls at high speeds in a lab and studying the results. Today, though, that won’t cut it. Testing like that doesn’t see if a car has side-channel vulnerabilities in its infotainment system, or if it can tell the difference between a stop sign and a yield sign. While driving might seem simple enough to those of us that have been doing it for a long time, to a computer, the sheer number of variables is astounding. A regular person can easily filter what’s important and what’s not, but a machine learning system would have to learn all of that from scratch. Green Hills Software posits that it would take nine billion miles of driving for a machine learning system of today’s caliber to reach an average driver’s level—and for an autonomous car, “average” isn’t good enough. It has to be perfect.

A certifier for autonomous vehicles has a herculean task, then. And if that doesn’t sound hard enough, consider this: in modern machine-vision systems, something called the “single pixel hack” can be exploited to mess them up. Let’s say you have a stop sign, and a system designed to recognize that object as a stop sign. Randomly, you change one pixel of the image to a different color, and then check to see if the system still recognizes the stop sign. To a human, who knows that a stop sign is octagonal, red, and has “STOP” written in white block letters, a stop sign that’s half blue and maybe bent a bit out of shape is still, obviously, a stop sign—plus, we can use context clues to ascertain that sign at an intersection where there’s a white line on the pavement in front of our vehicle probably means we should stop. We can do this because we can process the factors that identify a stop sign “softly”—it’s okay if it’s not quite right; we know what it’s supposed to be. Having a computer do the same is much more difficult. What if the stop sign has graffiti on it? Will the system still recognize it as a stop sign? How big of an aberration needs to be present before the system no longer acknowledges the mostly-red, mostly-octagonal object that might at one point have had “stop” written on it as a stop sign? To us, a stop sign is a stop sign, even with one pixel changed—but change it in the right spot, and the computer might disagree.

The National Institute of Security and Technology tracks vulnerabilities along those lines in all sorts of systems; by their database, a major vulnerability is found in Linux every three days. And despite all our efforts to promote security, this isn’t a battle we’re winning right now—the number of vulnerabilities is increasing all the time.

Check back next time to see the other side: what does Green Hills Software propose we do about these problems? Read part 2 now.

If you missed the first part of this series, you can find it here.

So: what does Green Hills Software propose we do?

The issue of “solving security” is, at its core, impossible—security can never be 100% assured. What we can do is make it as difficult as possible for security holes to develop. This can be done in a couple ways; one is to make small code in small packs executed by a “safing plan”—having each individual component be easier to verify goes a long way toward ensuring the security of the system. Don’t have sensors connect directly to objects—instead have them output to the safing plan first, which can establish control and ensure that nothing can be used incorrectly or in unintended ways. Make sure individual software components are sufficiently isolated to minimize the chances of a side-channel attack being viable.

What all of these practices mean, however, is that a system needs to be architected with security in mind from the very beginning. Managers need to emphasize and reward secure development right from the planning stages, or the comprehensive approach required to ensure that a system is as secure as it can be won’t come together. When something in someone else’s software breaks, pay attention—mistakes are costly, but only one person has to make it before others can learn from it and ensure it doesn’t happen again. Experts are experts for a reason—when an independent expert tells you something in your design is not secure, don’t brush them off because the fix is expensive. This is what Green Hills Software does, and it’s how they ensure that their software is secure.

Now, where does Cadence fit into all of this? Cadence has a number of certified secure offerings a user can take advantage of when planning their new designs. The Tensilica portfolio of IP is a great way to ensure basic components of your design are foolproof. As always, the Cadence Verification Suite is great for security verification in both simulation and emulation, and JasperGold platform’s formal apps are a part of that suite as well.

We are entering a new age of autonomous technology, and with that new age we have to update our security measures to match. It’s not good enough to “patch up” security at the end—security needs to beat the forefront of a verification engineer or hardware designer’s mind at all stages of development. For a lot of applications, quite literally, lives are at stake. It’s uncharted territory out there, but with Green Hills Software and Cadence’s tools and secure IP, we can ensure the safety of tomorrow.

With ECAD-MCAD Library Creator, you can easily create footprints for your parts using thousands of ready-to-use templates that are provided with the tool.(read more)

Longfellow's metaphorical footprints on the sands of time is more profound and eternal no doubt but a footprint for silicon (a form of sand isn't it?) is as important for PCB designers. So, here we will list the steps to create a fo...(read more)

In my previous blog, I talked about creating a footprint using an existing template in Allegro ECAD-MCAD Library Creator and explained how easily you can access an existing template and create a package from it by just clicking a button. In this blog...(read more)

DAC is right around the corner! On the demo floor at Cadence® Booth #2214, we will demonstrate how to use the Cadence mixed-signal and low-power solution to design, verify, and implement a microcontroller-based mixed-signal design. The demo design architecture is very similar to practical designs of many applications like power management ICs, automotive controllers, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Cadene tools demonstrated in this design include Virtuoso® Schematic Editor, Virtuoso Analog Design Environment, Virtuoso AMS Designer, Virtuoso Schematic Model Generator, Virtuoso Power Intent Assistant, Incisive® Enterprise Simulator with DMS option, Virtuoso Digital Implementation, Virtuoso Layout Suite, Encounter® RTL Compiler, Encounter Test, and Conformal Low Power. An extended version of this demo will also be shown at the ARM® Connected Community Pavilion Booth #921.

For additional highlights on Cadence mixed-signal and low-power solutions, stop by our booth for:

• The popular book, Mixed-signal Methodology Guide, which will be on sale during DAC week!
• A sneak preview of the eBook version of the Mixed-signal Methodology Guide
• Customer presentations at the Cadence DAC Theater
  • 9am, Tuesday, June 4  ARM  Low-Power Verification of A15 Hard Macro Using CLP 
  • 10:30am, Tuesday, June 4  Silicon Labs  Power Mode Verification in Mixed-Signal Chip
  • 12:00pm, Tuesday, June 4  IBM  An Interoperable Flow with Unified OA and QRC Technology Files
  • 9am, Wednesday, June 5  Marvell  Low-Power Verification Using CLP
  • 4pm, Wednesday, June 5  Texas Instruments  An Inter-Operable Flow with Unified OA and QRC Technology Files
• Partner presentations at the Cadence DAC Theater
  • 10am, Monday, June 3  X-Fab  Rapid Adoption of Advanced Cadence Design Flows Using X-FAB's AMS Reference Kit
  • 3:30pm, Monday, June 3  TSMC TSMC Custom Reference Flow for 20nm -  Cadence Track
  • 9:30am,Tuesday, June 4  TowerJazz   Substrate Noise Isolation Extraction/Model Using Cadence Analog Flow
  • 12:30pm, Wednesday, June 5  GLOBALFOUNDRIES  20nm/14nm Analog/Mixed-signal Flow
  • 2:30pm, Wednesday, June 5  ARM  Cortex®-M0 and Cortex-M0+: Tiny, Easy, and Energy-efficient Processors for Mixed-signal Applications
• Technology sessions at suites
  • 10am, Monday, June 3    Low-power Verification of Mixed-signal Designs
  • 2pm, Monday, June 3      Advanced Implementation Techniques for Mixed-signal Designs
  • 2pm, Monday, June 3      LP Simulation: Are You Really Done?
  • 4pm, Monday, June 3      Power Format Update: Latest on CPF and IEEE 1801  
  • 11am, Wednesday, June 5   Mixed-signal Verification
  • 11am, Wednesday, June 5   LP Simulation: Are You Really Done?
  • 4pm, Wednesday, June 5   Successful RTL-to-GDSII Low-Power Design (FULL)
  • 5pm, Wednesday, June 5   Custom/AMS Design at Advanced Nodes

We will also have three presentations at the Si2 booth (#1427):

• 10:30am, Monday, June 3   An Interoperable Implementation Solution for Mixed-signal Design
• 11:30am, Tuesday, June 4   Low-power Verification for Mixed-signal Designs Using CPF
• 10:30am, Wednesday, June 5   System-level Low-power Verification Using Palladium

We have a great program at DAC. Click the link for complete Cadence DAC Theater and Technology Sessions. Look forward to seeing you at DAC!     

Hi experts,

I have a problem with my design as below

ERROR: in SHAPE (-2.3622 2.3622)

  class = ETCH

  subclass = TOP 

  Part of Symbol Def SHAPE_4725X4725.

      Which is part of a padstack as a SHAPE symbol.

  ERROR(SPMHDB-187): SHAPE boundary may not cross itself.

   Error cannot be fixed.

       Object has first point location at (-2.3622 2.3622).

Can you tell me how to solve my problem?

Thanks a lot.

I would like to generate the comparison report of database footprint with library footprint if any mismatch available.

Is there a way to take if it possible means can anyone please guide me or share me the skill code please.

Thanks,

Pradeep

Hi all,

I am creating shapes on plane layers for a coupon and want to void them using axlShapeAutoVoid()

The shapes are attached to a symbol.

I've tried using axlShapeAutoVoid, but this only voids the pins, not the route keepouts created by nc_backdrill.

I also tried selecting the shape, individually, then running axlShapeAutoVoid. That was unsuccessful, also.

planeShapes is a list of shapes I created. The code for voiding:

;run backdrill to get route keepouts
axlShell("setwindow pcb;backdrill setup ;setwindow form.nc_backdrill;FORM nc_backdrill apply ;FORM nc_backdrill close")

foreach(sHape planeShapes
axlShapeAutoVoid(car(sHape))
)

Hi guys,

eDave,

I need to call (replay) a skill to combine some skills to ONE UI for more convenience and using as more easier.

Please help me to find the command to execute this.(code for example as more good)

HT,

This is the 15th installment of The Rationalist, my column for the Times of India.

It’s election season, and promises are raining down on voters like rose petals on naïve newlyweds. Earlier this week, the Congress party announced a minimum income guarantee for the poor. This Friday, the Modi government released a budget full of sops. As the days go by, the promises will get bolder, and you might feel important that so much attention is being given to you. Well, the joke is on you.

Every election, HL Mencken once said, is “an advance auction sale of stolen goods.” A bunch of competing mafias fight to rule over you for the next five years. You decide who wins, on the basis of who can bribe you better with your own money. This is an absurd situation, which I tried to express in a limerick I wrote for this page a couple of years ago:

POLITICS: A neta who loves currency notes/ Told me what his line of work denotes./ ‘It is kind of funny./ We steal people’s money/And use some of it to buy their votes.’

We’re the dupes here, and we pay far more to keep this circus going than this circus costs. It would be okay if the parties, once they came to power, provided good governance. But voters have given up on that, and now only want patronage and handouts. That leads to one of the biggest problems in Indian politics: We are stuck in an equilibrium where all good politics is bad economics, and vice versa.

For example, the minimum guarantee for the poor is good politics, because the optics are great. It’s basically Garibi Hatao: that slogan made Indira Gandhi a political juggernaut in the 1970s, at the same time that she unleashed a series of economic policies that kept millions of people in garibi for decades longer than they should have been.

This time, the Congress has released no details, and keeping it vague makes sense because I find it hard to see how it can make economic sense. Depending on how they define ‘poor’, how much income they offer and what the cost is, the plan will either be ineffective or unworkable.

The Modi government’s interim budget announced a handout for poor farmers that seemed rather pointless. Given our agricultural distress, offering a poor farmer 500 bucks a month seems almost like mockery.

Such condescending handouts solve nothing. The poor want jobs and opportunities. Those come with growth, which requires structural reforms. Structural reforms don’t sound sexy as election promises. Handouts do.

A classic example is farm loan waivers. We have reached a stage in our politics where every party has to promise them to assuage farmers, who are a strong vote bank everywhere. You can’t blame farmers for wanting them – they are a necessary anaesthetic. But no government has yet made a serious attempt at tackling the root causes of our agricultural crisis.

Why is it that Good Politics in India is always Bad Economics? Let me put forth some possible reasons. One, voters tend to think in zero-sum ways, as if the pie is fixed, and the only way to bring people out of poverty is to redistribute. The truth is that trade is a positive-sum game, and nations can only be lifted out of poverty when the whole pie grows. But this is unintuitive.

Two, Indian politics revolves around identity and patronage. The spoils of power are limited – that is indeed a zero-sum game – so you’re likely to vote for whoever can look after the interests of your in-group rather than care about the economy as a whole.

Three, voters tend to stay uninformed for good reasons, because of what Public Choice economists call Rational Ignorance. A single vote is unlikely to make a difference in an election, so why put in the effort to understand the nuances of economics and governance? Just ask, what is in it for me, and go with whatever seems to be the best answer.

Four, Politicians have a short-term horizon, geared towards winning the next election. A good policy that may take years to play out is unattractive. A policy that will win them votes in the short term is preferable.

Sadly, no Indian party has shown a willingness to aim for the long term. The Congress has produced new Gandhis, but not new ideas. And while the BJP did make some solid promises in 2014, they did not walk that talk, and have proved to be, as Arun Shourie once called them, UPA + Cow. Even the Congress is adopting the cow, in fact, so maybe the BJP will add Temple to that mix?

Benjamin Franklin once said, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.” This election season, my friends, the people of India are on the menu. You have been deveined and deboned, marinated with rhetoric, seasoned with narrative – now enter the oven and vote.

The India Uncut Blog © 2010 Amit Varma. All rights reserved.
Follow me on Twitter.

This is the 16th installment of The Rationalist, my column for the Times of India.

Steven Pinker, in his book Enlightenment Now, relates an old Russian joke about two peasants named Boris and Igor. They are both poor. Boris has a goat. Igor does not. One day, Igor is granted a wish by a visiting fairy. What will he wish for?

“I wish,” he says, “that Boris’s goat should die.”

The joke ends there, revealing as much about human nature as about economics. Consider the three things that happen if the fairy grants the wish. One, Boris becomes poorer. Two, Igor stays poor. Three, inequality reduces. Is any of them a good outcome?

I feel exasperated when I hear intellectuals and columnists talking about economic inequality. It is my contention that India’s problem is poverty – and that poverty and inequality are two very different things that often do not coincide.

To illustrate this, I sometimes ask this question: In which of the following countries would you rather be poor: USA or Bangladesh? The obvious answer is USA, where the poor are much better off than the poor of Bangladesh. And yet, while Bangladesh has greater poverty, the USA has higher inequality.

Indeed, take a look at the countries of the world measured by the Gini Index, which is that standard metric used to measure inequality, and you will find that USA, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Kingdom all have greater inequality than Bangladesh, Liberia, Pakistan and Sierra Leone, which are much poorer. And yet, while the poor of Bangladesh would love to migrate to unequal USA, I don’t hear of too many people wishing to go in the opposite direction.

Indeed, people vote with their feet when it comes to choosing between poverty and inequality. All of human history is a story of migration from rural areas to cities – which have greater inequality.

If poverty and inequality are so different, why do people conflate the two? A key reason is that we tend to think of the world in zero-sum ways. For someone to win, someone else must lose. If the rich get richer, the poor must be getting poorer, and the presence of poverty must be proof of inequality.

But that’s not how the world works. The pie is not fixed. Economic growth is a positive-sum game and leads to an expansion of the pie, and everybody benefits. In absolute terms, the rich get richer, and so do the poor, often enough to come out of poverty. And so, in any growing economy, as poverty reduces, inequality tends to increase. (This is counter-intuitive, I know, so used are we to zero-sum thinking.) This is exactly what has happened in India since we liberalised parts of our economy in 1991.

Most people who complain about inequality in India are using the wrong word, and are really worried about poverty. Put a millionaire in a room with a billionaire, and no one will complain about the inequality in that room. But put a starving beggar in there, and the situation is morally objectionable. It is the poverty that makes it a problem, not the inequality.

You might think that this is just semantics, but words matter. Poverty and inequality are different phenomena with opposite solutions. You can solve for inequality by making everyone equally poor. Or you could solve for it by redistributing from the rich to the poor, as if the pie was fixed. The problem with this, as any economist will tell you, is that there is a trade-off between redistribution and growth. All redistribution comes at the cost of growing the pie – and only growth can solve the problem of poverty in a country like ours.

It has been estimated that in India, for every one percent rise in GDP, two million people come out of poverty. That is a stunning statistic. When millions of Indians don’t have enough money to eat properly or sleep with a roof over their heads, it is our moral imperative to help them rise out of poverty. The policies that will make this possible – allowing free markets, incentivising investment and job creation, removing state oppression – are likely to lead to greater inequality. So what? It is more urgent to make sure that every Indian has enough to fulfil his basic needs – what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in his fine book On Inequality, called the Doctrine of Sufficiency.

The elite in their airconditioned drawing rooms, and those who live in rich countries, can follow the fashions of the West and talk compassionately about inequality. India does not have that luxury.

The India Uncut Blog © 2010 Amit Varma. All rights reserved.
Follow me on Twitter.

This is the 17th installment of The Rationalist, my column for the Times of India.

One of my favourite English words comes from chess. If it is your turn to move, but any move you make makes your position worse, you are in ‘Zugzwang’. Narendra Modi was in zugzwang after the Pulwama attacks a few days ago—as any Indian prime minister in his place would have been.

An Indian PM, after an attack for which Pakistan is held responsible, has only unsavoury choices in front of him. He is pulled in two opposite directions. One, strategy dictates that he must not escalate. Two, politics dictates that he must.

Let’s unpack that. First, consider the strategic imperatives. Ever since both India and Pakistan became nuclear powers, a conventional war has become next to impossible because of the threat of a nuclear war. If India escalates beyond a point, Pakistan might bring their nuclear weapons into play. Even a limited nuclear war could cause millions of casualties and devastate our economy. Thus, no matter what the provocation, India needs to calibrate its response so that the Pakistan doesn’t take it all the way.

It’s impossible to predict what actions Pakistan might view as sufficient provocation, so India has tended to play it safe. Don’t capture territory, don’t attack military assets, don’t kill civilians. In other words, surgical strikes on alleged terrorist camps is the most we can do.

Given that Pakistan knows that it is irrational for India to react, and our leaders tend to be rational, they can ‘bleed us with a thousand cuts’, as their doctrine states, with impunity. Both in 2001, when our parliament was attacked and the BJP’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee was PM, and in 2008, when Mumbai was attacked and the Congress’s Manmohan Singh was PM, our leaders considered all the options on the table—but were forced to do nothing.

But is doing nothing an option in an election year?

Leave strategy aside and turn to politics. India has been attacked. Forty soldiers have been killed, and the nation is traumatised and baying for blood. It is now politically impossible to not retaliate—especially for a PM who has criticized his predecessor for being weak, and portrayed himself as a 56-inch-chested man of action.

I have no doubt that Modi is a rational man, and knows the possible consequences of escalation. But he also knows the possible consequences of not escalating—he could dilute his brand and lose the elections. Thus, he is forced to act. And after he acts, his Pakistan counterpart will face the same domestic pressure to retaliate, and will have to attack back. And so on till my home in Versova is swallowed up by a nuclear crater, right?

Well, not exactly. There is a way to resolve this paradox. India and Pakistan can both escalate, not via military actions, but via optics.

Modi and Imran Khan, who you’d expect to feel like the loneliest men on earth right now, can find sweet company in each other. Their incentives are aligned. Neither man wants this to turn into a full-fledged war. Both men want to appear macho in front of their domestic constituencies. Both men are masters at building narratives, and have a pliant media that will help them.

Thus, India can carry out a surgical strike and claim it destroyed a camp, killed terrorists, and forced Pakistan to return a braveheart prisoner of war. Pakistan can say India merely destroyed two trees plus a rock, and claim the high moral ground by returning the prisoner after giving him good masala tea. A benign military equilibrium is maintained, and both men come out looking like strong leaders: a win-win game for the PMs that avoids a lose-lose game for their nations. They can give themselves a high-five in private when they meet next, and Imran can whisper to Modi, “You’re a good spinner, bro.”

There is one problem here, though: what if the optics don’t work?

If Modi feels that his public is too sceptical and he needs to do more, he might feel forced to resort to actual military escalation. The fog of politics might obscure the possible consequences. If the resultant Indian military action causes serious damage, Pakistan will have to respond in kind. In the chain of events that then begins, with body bags piling up, neither man may be able to back down. They could end up as prisoners of circumstance—and so could we.

***

Also check out:

Why Modi Must Learn to Play the Game of Chicken With Pakistan—Amit Varma
The Two Pakistans—Episode 79 of The Seen and the Unseen
India in the Nuclear Age—Episode 80 of The Seen and the Unseen

The India Uncut Blog © 2010 Amit Varma. All rights reserved.
Follow me on Twitter.

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.

The India Uncut Blog © 2010 Amit Varma. All rights reserved.
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Hi supporters,

I got the following error while I run simulation with gate netlist using Cadence Incisive (v15.20):

----

ncsim(64): 15.20-s076: (c) Copyright 1995-2019 Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
ncsim: *E,DLOALB: Design library 'tcbnxxx' not defined while reading module tcbnxxx.MAOxxx:bv (VST).
ncsim: *F,NOSIMU: Errors initializing simulation 'alu_tb' 

----

xxx: standard library name.

My netlist design uses a cell "MAOxxx". I already included the library behavior model to compile using ncverilog, there is no error while compiling. But when I run with ncsim to execute the test, I got above error.

I tried to run with other vendors such as VCS or MTI, they worked.

Please help to understand the error.

Thanks.

Hi,

I've vhdl block containing fsm . IMC not able to auto extract the state machine coded like this:

There is a intermediate state state_mux  between next_state & state.

Pls. help in guiding IMC how to recognize this FSM coding style? 

Snipped of the fsm code:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

               type state_type is (ST_IDLE, ST_ADDRESS, ST_ACK_ADDRESS, ST_READ, ST_ACK_READ, ST_WRITE, ST_ACK_WRITE, ST_IDLE_BYTE);

               signal state : state_type;

               signal state_mux : state_type;

               signal next_state : state_type;

process(state_mux, start)

         begin

               next_state <= state_mux;

               next_count <= (others => '0');

           case (state_mux) is

                 when ST_IDLE => 

                            if(start = '1') then

                                 next_state <= ST_ADDRESS;

                              end if;

            when ST_ADDRESS =>

   …………….

          when others => null;

         end case;

     end process;

process(scl_clk_n, active_rstn)

               begin

                      if(active_rstn = '0') then

                           state <= ST_IDLE after delay_f;

                  elsif(scl_clk_n'event and scl_clk_n = '1') then

                             state <= next_state after delay_f;

                            end if;

end process;

process(state, start)

               begin

                     state_mux <= state;

               if(start = '1') then

                       state_mux <= ST_IDLE;

                              end if;

               end process;

Thanks

Raghu

Hi

     I want develope basic circuit of DC motor which consist of resistor, inductor and back emf in capture and check its simulation in pspice, for reference I have attached image and link.

https://www.precisionmicrodrives.com/content/ab-025-using-spice-to-model-dc-motors/ .

xmsim is not exiting the simulation for this error. It is unusual for the simulator to not exit for an error. I have just started using uvm and this is occurring during the randomization step for a sequencer item.

xmsim: *E,RNDCNSTE

I am using -EXIT on the command line.

I am using Xcelium 19.03-s013.

Any insights are appreciated. Thanks.

-Jim

Picture 1 show a Shape created in Allegro PCB Editor 16.6, file LTshape.ssm      The Shape Origin is dead center of the outline 565X400 mils.    This Shape is utilized in the PadStack Editor to create a special Pin for a custom Footprint.
Picture 2 show the PadStack Editor first page with drill size and offset. File  LTshape16.pad         Picture 3 show the PadStack Editor page 2 with that LTshape utilized as the BEGIN LAYER for copper area. Picture 4 show the actual Package (footprint) finished with Outline, padstacks for pin 1,2,4,5 and that special Pin 3 LTshape. Its origin is also dead center, same as LTshape.ssm

Notice the round dot at the bottom of Pin 3. It only appear in the Package drawing, not in the original Picture 1, the actual LTshape.ssm or LTshape.dra

Picture 5 shows that same Footprint in the final board in PCB Editor. That same dot, now pink, is still there and cannot be selected separately. When using the Find Option and selecting each object separately, the only way to select Pin 3 is when Option > Pin is selected. Then I can hover on the dot near Pin 3 and the whole LTshape lights up as pin 3, but not the pink dot. There is absolutely no way I can select that dot as an object. There is no way to know the existence of that dot except by looking at it. Cannot be deleted, cannot be selected, can only be invisible if I use the Color Visibility manager and disable all 4 layers, TOP GND VCC BOTTOM. If I turn On TOP then the dot becomes pink. With GND On the dot is green, VCC On will get a Red dot, BOTTOM On will not show the dot but Pin 3 turn On since LTshape is the actual Net connected. This Net is not GND nor VCC, it is N357726.

Where is this dot coming from and why is it not a selectable object ? Why can I not delete it ?

I am using PCB Editor v17.2-2016.

I tried to do placement by schematic page but not all pages are displayed.

Earlier, I successfully do the placement by schematic pages and it was showing all the pages. But then I decided to delete all placed components and to do placement again.

When I try to do placement by schematic page again, I noticed that only the pages that I have successfully do all the placement previously are missing.

Hi everyone! I'm working on a small battery powered PCB which will fit inside a small plastic "hockey puck" container. A number of these "pucks" will be sold together with a "charging doc" which will store and charge the pucks when not in use.

I'm trying to work out the best way to charge the battery. I'm thinking of having metal "pads" on the rr.com puck that pass through the puck's plastic shell and then make contact with the PCB on the inside, and having a similar system on the charging dock. I'm thinking of having SMD "contact sprints" mounted to the underside of the PCB and have these mate against metal pins that protrude through the puck, but it's the later of which I'm struggling to find. For a visual, think about "restaurant pagers" and how they charge.