Archive for 2010

On Sunday, December 5, 2010, the IEEE Standards Association held their annual Awards Ceremony. The event was again most enjoyable with good friends, esteemed colleagues, good food, musical entertainment, beautiful flower arrangements, and the ever-popular duet of Judy Gorman (IEEE-SA Managing Director) and Mary Lynne Nielsen (Director of the IEEE-SA’s Corporate Program). At the heart of the occasion was, of course, the awards.

I’d like to highlight two of the IEEE-SA awards as they pertain directly to the technical standards work I’ve been involved in – design automation. The first is the Ron Waxman Design Automation Standards Committee Meritorious Service Award. It was presented to Dr. Hal Carter, Professor Emeritus at the University of Cincinnati. Hal was a founding member of the DASC (along with Ron Waxman) and has contributed broadly to the advancement of electronic design. The gentleman in the photo below are (from left to right) Ron Waxman, Chuck Adams (President of the IEEE-SA), Hal Carter, and Ted Olsen (Chair of the IEEE-SA Awards Committee).

The second award is the IEEE-SA Corporate Award which is given to companies that provide outstanding leadership and contributions to IEEE standards. The big grin is on my face below (that’s Rich Goldman on the left, Yatin Trivedi on the right) because Synopsys received the award! For many years, our employees – past and present – have worked hard to further IEEE standards, and the award belongs to a whole team of people.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the IEEE-SA Corporate Award was also presented to Underwriters Laboratories (you see their logo everywhere) for their commitment to safety standards that affect everyone’s daily lives.

Congratulations to all of this year’s IEEE-SA award recipients and those who helped make them successful!

I’ve decided to create a new series in my blog that gives real world, real time examples of “The Ten Commandments for Effective Standards” in action. As I see activities, successes, and challenges in the standards game that pertain to one of the “commandments”, I’ll point them out. If you come across any good examples, be sure to let me know and I’ll be glad to write about them (and give you credit, of course).

A few weeks ago, an instance of the second commandment – Use Caution When Mixing Patents and Standards – arose as Microsoft filed a lawsuit against Motorola. Microsoft is claiming that Motorola broke its promises to the IEEE-SA and ITU to offer a Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (RAND) license to Motorola’s patents that Motorola identified as being related to WLAN and H.264 video compression. Motorola denies the claim and says it licensing is reasonable.

For countless reasons, I won’t make any judgments on which company is right or wrong or the shades of gray in between. However, I do want to emphasize that this suit (among so many others) is the reason why a standards organization’s intellectual property policy is so important. The IP policies of the IEEE-SA and ITU will likely play a key role as this dispute is resolved. As Yatin Trivedi said when he sent me the link to an article about the lawsuit, “Maybe this suit (and its settlement) will give new understanding of the IP policy in standards organizations.”

There are surely high stakes to be won or lost in the Microsoft vs. Motorola suit because the consumer electronic products industry is massive. And the big question is who’s to decide what RAND really is? The answer will be up to the courts.

In case you missed the 23rd EDA Interoperability Forum, here are some brief highlights. We will make the presentations available on the Forum website on October 30. The turnout was quite good. Thanks to all the presenters and attendees for participating. Thanks also, to Oracle for providing their beautiful auditorium at their Agnews Center.

I was the MC for this event and I did enjoy myself – plus learned some new things. In the opening remarks, I reminded everyone of this year’s Tenzing Norgay Interoperability Achievement award, the IEEE-ISTO, for their work with the Interconnect Modeling Technical Advisory Board and the Liberty Technical Advisory Board. We gave away copies of my book, The Ten Commandments for Effective Standards, and had drawings for iPod Nanos.

Conversation Central was broadcast live from the stage of the Forum. Show notes (along with the recording) are available now. If you’ve subscribed to Conversation Central via iTunes, the podcast will magically appear shortly.

Additional program highlights:

Jingwen Yuan provided the latest information about the IPL Alliance. The IPL 1.0 download package is now available. A noteworthy next step for the IPL Alliance is to collaborate with Si2’s OpenPDK  effort to avoid ,multiple standards for PDKs. The Alliance will continue to maintain and improve IPL1.0, work on standards for analog constraints, educate the industry, and grow the IPL Alliance (STMicroelectronics just joined), TSMC, TowerJazz, LFoundry, STARC have developed foundry iPDKs and multiple EDA tools support the iPDK standard – the Alliance’s efforts are paying off.

The IPL Alliance has a LinkedIn group called “IPL & iPDK”. This is a good place to connect with the more than 200 members.

Rich Morse (SpringSoft), who chairs the IPL Alliance design constraints working group, told the audience about his group’s efforts towards interoperable constraints for analog design. Today, there is no open, common standard in this space, and this group has a lot of good work ahead of them. They’ve defined a roadmap to tackle this one step at a time. Their goal is to be able to show early demos at DAC 2011. They definitely would appreciate donations! Technology, I mean, but I’m sure they’d take cash, too.

Yatin Trivedi (Synopsys) gave an update on standards from Accellera, IEEE-SA, OSCI, and some de facto standards as well. He reminded everyone that the end goal of standards is productivity – enabling the exchange of information in a long chain of tools and methodologies. Music to some ears (mine included) was hearing that Si2 has joined the IEEE P1801 (UPF) working group. Remember CPF and UPF, the two formats for describing low power design intent? The P1801 working group will now start reviewing where the two formats differ and propose a interoperable solution. There’s no clear schedule or plan yet, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Frank Schirrmeister (Synopsys) presented interesting data on the ROI of system-level design. Be sure to get his presentation to see the full report. He also described important cost reduction opportunities for system-level: design cost reductions, start software development early, augmentation with hardware based prototyping, and use virtual development kits. He said the system-level market is still young and there is a lot of opportunity.

Will Straus (Forward Concepts) presented his expert analyst’s view of the wireless market. It’s so big, it rivals the PC market. The market for cell phone components is $50B (!) with the LCD being the most costly of the components. He gave us insights into the components of smart phones and what’s coming in the future – the “Frankenphone” as he affectionately called it.

Will then led a session and panel of speakers with: Jose Corleto (Qualcomm), John Goodenough (ARM), Grant Martin (Tensilica), and Johannes Stahl (Synopsys). They talked about today’s changes and challenges in wireless from their different perspectives. And of course, the need for interoperability.

Janick Bergeron (Synopsys) provided good technical insights into register package interoperability for verifying complex system designs. He, along with Mark Glasser (Mentor) and Richard Weber (Semifore), helped answer register package questions and provided information about how to use UVM.

Overall, this was a successful Interoperability Forum and many people walked away with flowers (from the tables) as well as knowledge.

This week, the annual Phil Kaufman Award ceremony was held at the San Jose Marriott. It was a wonderful evening (more later) that I hope you had a chance to attend. If you missed it, here’s another opportunity to come to a valuable industry event. The 23rd EDA Interoperability Forum will be held on October 21, 2010 at the Agnews Center in Santa Clara CA. Register here – it’s free and open for everyone to attend. I hope you can make it!

The 23rd Interoperability Forum will focus on interop for system-level design, along with verification and the IPL Alliance for interoperable PDKs (physical design kits). We’ll have prizes and lunch (better than peanut butter and jelly, I promise) to enhance your experience at the Forum.

For the first time, we’ll broadcast a session of Conversation Central live from the stage of the Interoperability Forum. My guests will be Jose Corleto, Sr. Director of Engineering at Qualcomm, and Will Strauss, Principal Analyst at Forward Concepts. We’re going to talk about the need for system-level design interoperability and some of the challenges that customers face when doing system-level design. We’ll also hear a hint about Will’s survey on the ROI of system-level design (he’ll reveal the interesting results during his lunchtime keynote speech).

If you can’t make it to the Interoperability Forum, you can listen to the 30-minute Conversation Central show live at 11:00 am Pacific on October 21 by calling from any phone within the US: toll free (877) 439-2972 or internationally: +1 (646) 200-4379. Or you can listen to it later via our show notes blog or as a podcast from our iTunes channel. Plus, presentations from the full program will be made available on our Forum website afterwards.

As for the Phil Kaufman award ceremony that I was fortunate enough to attend, I send many congratulations to Pat Pistilli, this year’s recipient of arguably the most prestigious award in the Electronic Design Automation industry. You can read more about Pat’s contributions and accomplishments, along with the history of MP Associates, on the EDA Consortium’s website. His acceptance speech was heartwarming and funny, but what I enjoyed most was how Pat shared the spotlight with his lovely wife, Marie. (Trivia time: the “M” and “P” in MP Associates – the company that produces trade shows such as DAC and DVCon – are “Marie” and “Pat”.) They are a charming couple and I’m honored to know them.

After the ceremony was over, several of us went to the hotel lobby to get our valet-parked cars. While we stood outside, a dozen (I counted them) police cars swarmed the front entrance, and police officers jumped out of the cars and went into the hotel, clearly on a mission. We speculated that it had something to do with the Dalai Lama who was visiting the San Jose area. After a while, the officers returned, pushing a young man – obviously not the Dalai Lama – in a wheelchair. His legs stuck straight out and his feet were bound; his hands were tied behind his back (reminding me of Hannibal Lecter). Off they all went and that was the end of that. I never found out what happened, and even Google was no help. I guess it will be another thing that remains a mystery to me.

Anyway, I wanted to share a couple photos from the event (thanks to Jennifer Cermak from the EDA Consortium). And here’s a link to the video trailer that played on the big screen during dinner. I hope you enjoy them.

Pat and Marie

Pat and me

There comes a time in any writer’s life when she or he just can’t write. The well-known phenomenon of
“writer’s block” plaques professional authors, college students, and thank-you-note-writing-kids alike. Today, I have a bad case of it.

I wanted to write about something interesting. Posts about the WiMAX vs. LTE standards war, “The Web is Dead” from Wired magazine, and legal issues in social networking are sitting in my drafts folder, unformed and uninteresting.

One of my colleagues (“Rick Jamison of “The Listening Post” blog) compiled a list of resources that you might find helpful the next time writer’s block strikes you. Here they are. I’m going to read them.

Ten Ways to Cure Writers Block

How to Cure Writer’s Block

Writer’s Block: Is It All in Your Head?

How to Cure Writer’s Block – Eleven Tips

6 tips to cure writer’s block

How to Cure Writer’s Block

36 Ways To Cure Writer’s Block

Writer’s Block/ Writer’s Anxiety

Easy Ways to Stop Writer’s Block

(Note: Ed Lee, the well-known EDA & IP industry guru, and I recently had an interesting dialog about blogging: its value and the notion of engineers commenting on them. We decided to simultaneously publish two posts on the subject. We hope you like them.)

It’s been 3 years since I started blogging.

It wasn’t my idea to become a blogger. I thought the word “blog” sounded sluggish, and I wasn’t sure if my blog would bring value to my industry or my company. Always up for a challenge, I agreed without hesitation to be one of the first bloggers at Synopsys. Was I in for a surprise! Not only has “The Standards Game” become fairly popular, but I have made connections to some remarkable standards people in other industries. Blogging has been rewarding, exciting, and fun.

It’s also interesting to look back on how much has changed in the past 3 years with blogging in the EDA and IP industry. When I started, there were already some pioneer bloggers such as John Busco and JL Gray. (Please forgive me if you were one of the pioneers that I didn’t mention. Feel free to tell me – post a comment below.) They developed a following of readers who found them insightful or unusual. Then, a handful of EDA and IP companies (Synopsys was one of them) put their toes in the water and started company blogs.

In general, no one knew quite what to make of them. The debate over press vs. bloggers and putting bloggers into categories (independent, media, corporate…) ensued. Could bloggers be trusted? Should they be allowed in the hallowed press room? Should they be pre-approved and censored by corporate marcom overseers? Would they divulge the secret workings of the standards sausage factory? Were bloggers putting journalists out of business? The future of blogging in our industry was uncertain.

Yet people kept blogging, either for themselves, their companies, or their publications. And people kept reading their blogs. By now it’s safe to say that blogging is here to stay for EDA and IP, as it is in so many other arenas. The internet has given everyone a platform from which to share their knowledge and opinions. Yes, that means there’s a lot of stuff out there to wade through, but with tools such as Google Alerts and search.twitter.com you can easily filter the cacophony to find what you want to listen to. And journalists that you trust can aggregate it for you. (Ed Sperling’s blog roundup is a good example.) Blogs bring value as evidenced by their continuing existence.

Just what is the value of blogging? Here are some of the reasons that I and so many others continue to blog:

- Give and receive expert, unfiltered information

- Get information immediately

- Find sources of information and opinions to consume into cross-perspectives

- Obtain viewpoints from others, including competitors and customers

- Research, learn, and think beyond one’s regular sphere

- Fill a niche (who knew there was a dearth of information on standardization?)

- Develop material for larger publications (e.g., books such as “The Ten Commandments for Effective Standards”)

- Develop ideas for presentations (e.g., Brand Yourself!)

Can you measure the value? Believe it or not, measuring blogs (and other social channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter) is much easier and more effective than traditional vehicles such as press releases, mailed collateral, and print advertisements. While we can easily find out how many views our blogs receive, how long people stay on the pages, how many clicks are made on our URLs, and the geographic locations of IP addresses of readers, it’s impossible to know how many people read a press release or a magazine ad.

So what about comments on blogs? We haven’t seen the comment floodgates open up in EDA and IP. Yet the ones that do come in are gems. How can we bloggers get more of them? Allowing comments to be posted *without* moderation helps – sometimes. Asking readers to comment helps – sometimes. Writing about a controversial topic helps – sometimes. And then there are times when a person sends you a private email or walks up to you and says “I really liked your post” or “I don’t agree with you”. These comments, while not public, are as important as the ones that show up on your blog.

Maybe the anecdotal “1-9-90 rule” of social media is at play in EDA and IP: for every 100 internet users, there is 1 person writing content, 9 people commenting, and 90 people just reading. (Anyone want to do this study for EDA and IP with me?) Perhaps engineers actually comment more than the average internet user – we don’t really know. Or could it be that we engineers are just shy (present company excluded) or scared? There’s surely a logical explanation for our commenting patterns.

Be sure to read Ed Lee’s post – he shares some additional interesting thoughts about blog commenting. As always, EDA and IP bloggers say, “Comment away!”

Beyond the world of language and format standards for electronic design automation tools is a whole universe of other technical standards. One area that I haven’t written much about is standards that affect IP products. (By IP, I don’t mean Internet Protocol or Intellectual Property as ideas or inventions. In my industry, IP refers to the building blocks that are used in computer chip design.)

My colleague, John Swanson, recently wrote a good article about new standards for audio/video bridging, or AVB. He describes the advancements in entertainment and home networking which bring us more amazing electronic products every year. More products mean more opportunity – or need – for interoperability. More need for interoperability means more standards.

The venerable IEEE Standards Association is addressing the need for these AVB standards. They will affect the entire supply chain, starting with IP such as Synopsys’ DesignWare® Ethernet QoS IP core. While you might never see the standards, you’ll certainly see the benefits.

While writing “The Ten Commandments for Effective Standards”, I stumbled across the University of New Hampshire’s InterOperability Lab. It’s quite an undertaking, and we’re all benefiting from their efforts. I wanted to learn more about what goes on at the InterOperability Lab and if it might pertain to EDA software. Today I had the pleasure of talking with Jon Beckwith and Bob Noseworthy, senior and chief engineers at the Lab. They gave me enough information to write another book, but for now I’ll just summarize our conversation.

The UNH InterOperability Lab was founded in 1988 and has grown into a major operation with around 120 people (100 are students) working in a 32,000 sq. ft. facility on some 26 programs in data networking and storage technology. The Lab is funded willfully by industry: companies pay fees (very reasonable amounts, IMHO, to cover expenses) and provide their latest products for inclusion in test beds.

Pretty much anything that has to do with networking can be tested for interoperability – i.e., compliance to standards – at the Lab. (Standards are the beginning of interoperability, but it’s conformance testing of products which implement a standard that uncovers limits, ambiguities, or missing parts in the standard.) The Lab delivers confidential reports to participating companies which tell them whether their products are robustly interoperable – or not. Product performance, price, features, and the like are not analyzed; that’s left up to the companies as they go about running their businesses.

For students working at the InterOperability Lab, it’s doubly beneficial. Not only are they paid for their apprenticeships, but they also gain real world experience that augments their studies. They work on a team which must produce real results for companies whose businesses depend on them. The students build professionalism and learn how to communicate because the reports they issue to companies could imply product cost and delay. Plus, having their hands on the newest products gives them an appreciation of how theories they learn are actually applied.

What has made the InterOperability Lab a success? Three things, certainly. The lab provides a high quality service, at an affordable price, from a trustworthy source (earned over time). Additionally, engineers from the InterOperability Lab do something special to ensure that their compliance testing is the best it can be. They actually participate in the development of standards. Their contributions during the creation of a standard center around the question, “Why standardize something if you can’t test it?” As the standard’s specification is constructed, the Lab guys ask, “How are you going to test this?” This additional dimension makes for a better standard and ultimately, better products that implement it.

Every once in a while, the concept of standards compliance testing for EDA products comes up. It’s been quite a few years since our industry attempted it for Verilog simulators at a third party interoperability lab. Would an interoperability lab for EDA fly today? It would be a complicated process to put together the countless design flows and tests that would cover the bulk of EDA tools and standards in the market today. Security would be a necessity before EDA companies and customers would feel comfortable contributing their tools and design test cases. It could be expensive, too, unless many companies were willing to chip in.

Another question should be asked, “Is independent compliance testing needed for EDA?” If EDA tools were seriously noncompliant and not interoperable, customers would likely scream (the way they did when they needed a standard for low-power design), wouldn’t they? Or perhaps the cost of nonconformance to standards in EDA isn’t significant enough to warrant an independent compliance lab. Or maybe EDA vendors are doing an acceptable job of preventing and correcting interoperability problems? (I can feel eyes rolling.) It could be that customers have learned to live with a measure of non-interoperability in favor of getting new products faster. It would be interesting to learn if an interoperability lab like that of the University of New Hampshire would bring a big benefit to EDA.

One thing I didn’t learn about the University of New Hampshire’s InterOperability Lab is why the “O” is capitalized. I’ll have to call Jon and Bob.

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There’s an interesting article in the July 2010 edition of Wired magazine (yes, it’s the print publication I subscribe to, but only because the FAA won’t let us read electronically during takeoff and landing – one of the best times to read). The article is about Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. Brin estimates that he has a 50/50 chance of contracting Parkinson’s, and he is helping fund research to find a cure – hopefully, before he develops the debilitating disease.

The entire article is intriguing – what Parkinson’s is, its possible genetic links, and the personal story of an intelligent, highly successful man. Yet, what fascinated me most was an underlying theme that the standard scientific method as we’ve known it could become extinct in the future.

You remember the scientific method: propose a hypothesis, design tests, analyze results, repeat until convinced. This standard method for gaining knowledge – for seeking the truth – has been used for a thousand years and has led to countless discoveries and breakthroughs.

The internet, or I should probably say the Information Age, could bring about the demise of the standard scientific method. How? By virtue of the massive amount of data that continues to be produced – prior to any hypotheses. The new scientific method, as talked about in the Wired article, could look like this: scan the data, look for patterns, draw conclusions, find truth. No more would a scientist have a sudden thought and seek to prove it. Instead, “regular” people would contribute data that, when aggregated, would reveal the secrets of science.

With an estimated 2 billion users of the internet today, the amount of data they can provide about a given problem is enormous. In the case of disease, for instance, people who report on their health and living conditions could reveal commonalities that today’s monster search engines could uncover: things that a limited set of tests, no matter how carefully thought out, could not. Disclosure would be voluntary – I don’t want to get into privacy issues here – and I suspect people who become ill or have loved ones in danger would be more than willing to contribute information to finding a cure, and even better, prevention.

The standards that I deal with every day are miniscule and fleeting compared to the scientific method. When a standard as ingrained as the scientific method is abandoned, I’m in awe.