Archive for June, 2010

The 47th Design Automation Conference is over and blog posts about the conference are appearing all over. (Sean Murphy is collecting them through the end of July on his website.) Instead of the “standard” post, recapping all the events and highlighting the latest technologies that were featured at the show, I thought I’d take a different approach and write about some things that you won’t read anywhere else.

Conversation Central was a hit. To date, there have been more than 1,000 listens to the 27 shows. From the outside, it looked like a smooth production (thank goodness), yet I had several moments of panic when participants couldn’t make it and we experienced technical difficulties. We even switched our internet service account type at 8:00 am on Monday – our first show started at 9:30. Despite these adrenaline rushes, we had “plan B”s in our back pocket and a producer (Roy Stahl from Synopsys) who magically fixed everything.

The 5 Conversation Central shows with the most listens so far are:

1. UVM: Verifying the Universe – Guests Tom Alsop & Hillel Miller, Host JL Gray

2. A New Era of SoC Design – Guest Subramani Kengeri, Host Phil Dworsky

3. Conversation Central Wrap-up and Sneak Peek – Guest Karen Bartleson, Host Rick Jamison

4. Standards Compliance – Guest Alpesh Shah, Host Karen Bartleson

5. Unconventional Blogging – Guest Brian Bailey, Host Harry Gries

Here’s Gabe Moretti talking with me in the Conversation Central session, “Archangel Gabe Debates with Karen on her Book”. I handed him a stone tablet just for grins and he flashed a million dollar bill (not real, of course) that he claimed was my gratuity to him.

Here’s Sachin Sapatnekar, the general chair of DAC 2010, being interviewed in Conversation Central by Rich Goldman, who wore 3D glasses for 30 minutes while hosting the session and didn’t get a headache.

All the Conversation Central sessions are available for listening, and we encourage comments. There’s a show for everyone, and each one is only 30 minutes. Rate and tell us what you think about the shows you listen to.

At DAC, we gave away more than 400 copies of my book “The Ten Commandments for Effective Standards” to anyone who wanted them. Some of the books went to employees of a major semiconductor company who are getting started in standards, some went to students, and some to long-time standards participants.

More than once, I overheard something like this: “Remember when we were young and came to DAC and wondered how all the old people knew each other? Now, we’re those old people.”

Rich Goldman and Mike Santarini have big hearts. Reportedly, they were blubbering in the audience during the high-school panel, “You Don’t Know Jack”, when a 16-year-old girl thanked all of us for our contributions to her world.

Some members of the press couldn’t get into some sessions that bloggers could. (They weren’t happy.)That’s quite a switch from a couple of years ago when bloggers couldn’t get into the press room, and they weren’t happy.

The Synopsys media dinner was delightful (except that the Mr. Stox restaurant let Mentor Graphics host their customer party at the same time ). The people at my table talked about earthquakes, radar detectors, and VMM whoopee cushions.

Twitter and blogging were nothing new at the 47th DAC. Last year, Twitter was a phenomenon at DAC, with the Twitter Tower and the hashtag, #46DAC, and I taught a special session “Twitter for Newbies” that was attended by the one and only Richard Goering. This year, #47DAC tweets made 551,104 impressions after the first week from 1500 tweets, the maximum allowed to be analyzed by Twitter(#46DAC tweets made 189, 368 impressions). Richard Goering was in the top 5 twitterers.

Chi-Foon Chan is really not a monster. He just played one at the Synopsys Interoperability Breakfast.

Three little DAC factoids:

1. If a company books a block of rooms at the Marriott, someone gets a suite (more like an apartment).

2. Band-aid blister ampoules are amazingly effective.

3. Newcomers to DAC didn’t know about the bagpipes.

Finally, something you probably don’t care about, but the week before DAC, I cleaned out my clothes closet. This was the result:

With the 47th DAC behind us, we’ll keep Conversation Central going (let me know if you’d like to hear any specific topics or guests) while planning what we’ll do at the 48th DAC. See you there!

Two years ago, I updated everyone on the Liberty standard which was the first open source standard in the electronic design automation industry. Synopsys made our .lib format (which evolved into Liberty) an open source standard in 1999, opening a new page in the standards game. Today, I’d like to talk briefly about the newest open source standard for EDA, the Interconnect Technology Format (ITF).

ITF is a very well established, mature format, and technology files written in this format exist for a large number of process nodes that designers are using today. It is the underlying format used by Synopsys’ interconnect parasitic extraction tools such as StarRC™. As an open source standard, ITF will enable all designers and foundries to support and qualify extraction technology files based on same format. Further, all EDA vendors’ tools will be able to support the format, providing increased efficiency and improved interoperability.

It is one thing to open up this format; yet it is quite another to enhance it in an open forum. A new technical committee under IEEE-ISTO called the Interconnect Modeling Technical Advisory Board (IMTAB) will provide exactly that. Eleven industry leaders make up the initial IMTAB. EDA companies (Apache, Magma, Mentor and Synopsys), foundries and IDMs (GLOBALFOUNDRIES, ST), and representatives from the user community (AMD, Altera, LSI, Nvidia, and Qualcomm) are the initial members for the IMTAB. The group is expected to meet at least twice a year to consider the enhancement proposals, debate the pros and cons, and vote on proposals to extend the format  appropriately. Future needs for the ITF standard, such as modeling of Through-Silicon Vias (TSV) for 3-D interconnect parasitics, will be addressed by the IMTAB.

As technology keeps advancing, new opportunities for standardization continue to arise.

Everyone’s invited to listen in and talk with special guests at this year’s Conversation Central. Yes, it will be a live event at the 47th Design Automation Conference, but it will also be live on the Internet for anyone who is unable to attend DAC or happens to be away from Synopsys’ booth during the conference.

If you’re at DAC, come to Synopsys’ main booth #595 to sit in the audience of any (or all!) of the 27 Conversation Central sessions.

To listen to a show from any other location (whether you’re at DAC or not) by phone, simply call within the US: toll free (877) 439-2972 or internationally: +1 (646) 200-4379 when the show you want to listen to is scheduled to start. That’s it! To ask a question or talk with the guest, press 1 on your phone and you’ll be put in the queue to go live.

To listen to a show using your computer, go to www.synopsys.com/ConversationCentral at the time a show starts and click on it. To ask a question or talk with the guest, you’ll need to have a free blogtalkradio.com account AND a Skype account. (If you don’t want a blogtalkradio.com account, you can use your Facebook account instead.) Go to www.synopsys.com/ConversationCentral, make sure you are logged into BlogTalkRadio, begin listening to the show, click on “Click to talk”, then follow the prompts (including clicking on another “Click to talk” in a popup window) to start Skype on your computer. This will vary depending on your browser and how you have Skype set up. When you’ve called in with Skype, dial “1” to be put in the queue to go live. (The dial pad of Skype is accessed with the “Other call functions” drop down.)

After DAC is over, you can listen to all of Conversation Central shows as we’ll record them for later listening. Go to www.synopsys.com/ConversationCentral, click on the shows you like, and enjoy! Plus, we’ll continue to bring you regularly scheduled sessions of Conversation Central throughout the year on a variety of interesting topics.

Here’s the Conversation Central schedule for DAC. It will be great to have you join us!