IP Systems Blog Review – Friday November 11, 2014

by Hamilton Carter, Senior Editor
 

The first post-acquisition Jasper User Group (JUG) conference was heldlast Monday and Tuesday in Santa Clara California.  Cadence’s Executive Vice President of the System and Verification Group, Charlie Huang, and Jasper’s Oz Levia each spoke about how the new Jasper products fit into the Cadence system verification flow.
 
 

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Ron Wilson, of Altera discusses the IoT hunger for low power devices and the somewhat paradoxical re-emergence of large feature size transistors.  The article is based Ron’s assertion that “…the [IoT] hype about enormous volumes has focused the industry’s attention on two specific aspects of the low-power question: the need to operate reliably at extremely low power drain, and the presence of very low duty cycles in many IoT and wearable nodes.”  From there, it’s an interesting ride through the technology that’s being inspired by energy scavenging devices, and circuits that operate near or even below device thresholds.

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The Altera Foundation Cup charity golf tournament raised over $55,000 for STEM education materials in Silicon Valley this year.  Was your company there?

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Malcolm Gladwell’s infamous 10,000 hours of practice is all the rage in education academia circles, and now it’s even permeated into the engineering press.  Whether you agree with Gladwell, or even know who he is, you can find a few more things to ponder practicing if you check out ANSYS’ variety of webinars ranging from electro-thermal analysis of RF filters to the fineries of bolt modeling.

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If you’re looking to hone your verification skills and you missed out on Mentor’s Verification Academy events this year, you’re in luck.  Mentor has posted their videos sessions so that all may benefit.

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Tom Hackett, an old friend of mine, presents this episode of Cadence’s Whiteboard Wednesdays.  If you use Cadence VIP tools, and you have a few minutes, try listening to the smooth tones of Tom’s educational engineering exposition.

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Two of National Instruments fastest growing product lines are powered by Xilinx FPGAs and Xilinx is justifiably proud.  Their post contains links to details about the NI products and a video teardown of NI’s VirtualBench board that took place at the recent ARM TechCon.

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And now, something that might make you a hero on the home front.  Intel explains how you can make your home WiFi network scream!  A few simple steps can lead to faster transfers for everyone.  OK, OK one of the tricks is to buy a new router.  However, if a new toy isn’t in your budget right now, the other tricks involve things you can do with your existing hardware.

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If you’re a Specmaniac and you want to get deeper under the covers of the e language or the Specman tool in general, then the “Generic dynamic run-time operations with e reflection” two part series is a must read!  If you’re looking to build extensions to your Specman environment, the reflection interface is just the thing.  Its method calls return lists of structs and fields within your verification environment.   I used this interface to build numerous handy little utilities while at Cadence, and loved the exuberant feeling of extending the Specman application each and every time I got to play with the framework.  Cadence has opened the API and is providing handy pointers on how to use it.  What will you build?

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Have you tried agile development?  Our verification team circa 2002 used it and loved it.  Jama’s Derwyn Harris offers some recommendations for rethinking the agile manifesto. What is agile development and its manifesto?  Well, since you asked.