Virtual Prototyping
Accelerate pre-RTL embedded software development, hardware/software integration, and system validation
Architecture Design
Quickly explore tradeoffs in your SoC architecture to achieve optimal product performance and cost to avoid over- or under-design
FPGA-Based Prototyping
Accelerate the creation of your ASIC prototype with a high-speed hardware prototyping environment including a comprehensive software flow
Core Optimization
Differentiate your product with the right combination of performance, power and area for your most design-critical cores
Design Flow Deployment
Optimize your design flow to address the latest design challenges
Physical Design Assistance
Leverage our tape-out proven flows and project experience to implement your very-deep submicron chip
IP Integration & SoC Verification
Get to market faster and reduce SoC design and verification cost by applying best practices in RTL creation and functional verification
In the technology era, there are a million-and-one ways to connect with the world. With a million-and-one different needs and personalities, it is difficult to choose just one channel that will allow us to most effectively listen to and communicate with our customers and partners.
Through the wisdom of experts and research by the authors, The Listening Post offers insights into a variety of aspects of today’s communication with a more specific focus on communicating effectively G2G (geek-to-geek).
About the Authors
Darcy Pierce
I’m actually just a kid trapped in a semi-adult body, I love cartoons, coloring and mac and cheese. I enjoy listening to Claire de Lune while taking ballet classes, but at the same time, a well-tuned muscle car is like music to my ears. I thrive on opportunities to spin what others find to be completely boring (or overly technical like microchips) into exciting and engaging marketing programs, because of this, Synopsys is my Disneyland and social media is my platform.
Geeky Confession: I secretly love math and numbers. I can recall phone numbers after only a short glance, and for some reason find it necessary to memorize my credit card numbers.
Hannah Watanabe
The “jaw-dropper” fact that most people are surprised to learn is that I was homeschooled K-12. I have never regretted this, and in the end, I am still just your everyday California girl—can’t get enough beach or sun. Whether it’s a day trip to Santa Cruz, a weekend in L.A., or an adventure on the other side of the world, I love to travel. My favorite outdoor activity is camping, and my true love is tap dancing. Other than social media, my passion is working with children because I’m reminded of the days when a crisis was not getting a second cup of animal crackers at snack time.
Geeky Confession: I occasionally spend an hour clicking on the ads on my Facebook page trying to figure out why they are targeting me. Then, I enter keywords into my profile in an attempt to capture ads that I’m actually interested in.
In our last post about DAC, we mentioned that we would be expanding on the presentation that we displayed in the Conversation Central area of the Synopsys booth. Before we go into detail about how we believe each social media platform can benefit engineers, we would like to share the presentation to give you a brief overview.
Do you agree with our reasoning? Are there any additional ways you believe social media benefits engineers? Please share your thoughts with us!
You may have noticed that some time has passed since we last made a post. We were completely engrossed in planning for the 48th Design Automation Conference, but we are satisfied with our activities at DAC this year. Being that this was our first time attending DAC, we thought we’d share our experience and activities with you.
Stepping on the show floor early Sunday afternoon was overwhelming. After months of extensive DAC planning, we had to pinch ourselves to make sure we were actually there.
Our home base was the Conversation Central area of the Synopsys booth.
Darcy and Hannah sitting on what should be labeled "The Conversation Central Comfy Couch"
Hannah opened her mouth and suggested to Karen that she do a video introducing what would be happening in the Conversation Central area over the next few days. Hannah’s suggestion backfired as Karen went wild over the brilliance of the idea and suggested that we both do it with her! This would have been less nerve racking if the video was not going to be broadcasted live through the Synopsys Facebook Page, but we fixed our hair, checked our makeup, put on a smile, and pulled off a pretty good introduction video. You can watch the playback versions of each of these videos on Synopsys’ Facebook Page or YouTube channel and catch guest like Jan Raebey, a UC Berkeley professor, who talked about putting microchips into people’s brains.
See our introduction video with Karen below.
It was Conversation Central’s first dance with not only video, but live video. Among 16 shows, we sprinkled in six live video shows. These shows were streamed live through the Synopsys Facebook Page using the LiveStream application. How much did this cost us? Not a single cent. Both the LiveStream account and Facebook application were free. You might assume that we used an extremely nice HD camcorder, but we found our Logitech webcam duct taped to a tripod, to be more than sufficient.
Our Logitech webcam duct taped to a tripod. High-tech at it's finest!
Our live show with Paul McLellan and Jim Hogan on the DAC floor being live streamed to Facebook
With three live audio shows, six live video shows, and seven recorded audio shows, we had plenty of room for a great lineup of guests. From Cloud Computing to chip design at 20nm, you will find a recap of each show posted daily from June 13th – June 28th onto the Conversation Central Show Notes page in a series that we are calling “The Voices of DAC”.
We didn’t stop with just Conversation Central. In the past, Synopsys has had a Twitter Tower in the general booth area for attendees to follow. We still displayed a large screen with three Twitter feeds, but this year we decided to step it up a notch and add an interactive element for our Twitter followers by hosting two Twitter games.
Twitter Game Card
The first game was called Twitter Trivia and was played by show guests attending specified events (outlined on game card) and answering a question that was tweeted by Synopsys at the beginning of each event. Once they figured out the answer from the topics discussed at the events, they would then tweet the answer to @Synopsys. Every time they answered a question correctly they were entered in a drawing for a Dell Streak 5. Our two winners, @Bruce1271 and @mguthaus, were able to pick up their prizes right in the booth.
We also had a contest to see who could use “@Synopsys” and/or “#snps” in their tweets the most during the week of DAC, allowing even those who were unable attend DAC a chance to win. Our winner @dennisbrophy, will be sent a Kindle 3!
Another addition to DAC this year was the use of QR codes. Not only did we have an entire sign right outside the booth dedicated to displaying QR codes that connected to each of our new media channels (see picture below), but we also had a station inside the booth that generated personalized LinkedIn Networking Cards that boasted a QR code that would link anyone with a smartphone to your own personal LinkedIn profile, making for easy connections in a fun techy way.
The cards were a hit! We had people come back with their colleagues’ business cards asking us to generate LinkedIn Networking Cards to give to them. We even had a few people ask if we would be able to send them cards in the future for others they knew.
When scanned with a QR code reader on a smartphone, each QR code linked to one of Synopsys' social media platforms
Hannah's personalized LinkedIn Networking Card
In addition to all of the above activities, we also had a screen with a rolling presentation that educated engineers on how they can benefit in their career from using the various social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Our next few blog posts will build off of this rolling presentation as we share how we believe engineers can benefit from social media.
Do you agree with our reasoning? Are there any additional ways you believe social media benefits engineers? Please share your thoughts with us!
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