FPGA Central

IC Journal Update




a techfocus media publication :: May 12, 2009 :: volume VI, no. 06









FROM THE EDITOR



Need help in choosing IP? Europe Editor, Dick Selwood, thinks he has found constellations of friends to lend a hand, with a new initiative from IPextreme. At the same time, a group of large companies are banding to together in the name of fighting patent trolls.

Thanks for reading! We love to get your feedback and suggestions; please send either or both to:
comments (AT) ICJournal (DOT) com. You can also make yourself heard publicly by going to our Journal Forums.

Bryon Moyer - Editor
IC Design and Verification Journal









EVENTS & ANNOUNCEMENTS











Announcing Verification Academy. First of its kind—unlike anything in the industry. Provides you the materials and courses needed to advance your verification skills to evolve your organization’s advanced functional verification capabilities.
Now available worldwide




















Take our BRAND NEW
SUPER QUICK, JUST A COUPLE OF QUESTIONS,
WON'T TAKE MUCH TIME AT ALL (WE PROMISE)
2009 Journal Reader Survey.



WEIGH IN NOW















LATEST NEWS



May 12, 2009



Agilent Technologies Introduces Education Kits for Analog, Digital and RF Engineering Curriculum



Toshiba Selects Synopsys as Its Key EDA Partner



Berkeley Design Automation Delivers Analog FastSPICE Platform With 2x Higher Performance and 10x Higher Capacity



MunEDA and NTHU Taiwan have closed a strategic cooperation agreement in research and education.



Mentor Graphics Delivers First HDTV Platform for the Accelerated Verification of HDMI and DisplayPort Products



May 11, 2009



Synopsys IC Validator Adopted by NVIDIA for Sign-off Physical Verification



Synopsys Launches IC Validator, Offers Significant Reduction in Physical Verification Turnaround Time for Advanced Designs



NMI Conference Presentation by Solido Design CTO to Address Variability Challenges for Analog and Mixed-Signal Design



The MathWorks Announces Simulink 3D Animation



May 8, 2009



DiSTI Releases the Moving Map Toolkit for GL Studio 4.0



DiSTI Releases Safety Critical Embedded C++ for GL Studio 4.0



May 7, 2009



Jazz Semiconductor Announces Cadence Virtuoso IC 6.1 Platform Techtorial



May 6, 2009



Agilent Technologies' New 18-GHz Differential TDR Probe Kit Improves Ergonomics, Usability



Agilent Technologies' Updated Firmware for DC Power Analyzer Incorporates Customer-Recommended Enhancements



ADLINK Provides Turnkey Software Solution for Data Acquisition Applications





CURRENT FEATURE ARTICLES



IP Mates, IP Stars and IP Trolls
(Dick Selwood)
Library Science
Magma’s SiliconSmart, Now With Functional Recognition (Bryon Moyer)
More Than A Zen Thing
A Look at Functional Qualification
(Bryon Moyer)
Does Noise Analysis Accuracy Really Matter?
by Michael Jacobs and Trisha Kristof, Cadence Design Systems
Bringing It Together – Some of It, Anyway
Synopsys Announces Lynx and Discovery
(Bryon Moyer)
But What Does It Mean?
Tagging, Indexing, and Querying Behaviors in RTL Designs (Bryon Moyer)



JOURNAL WEBCASTS



NEW! CHALK TALK Improving Software Development Productivity With Virtual Platforms. Are your SoC and embedded design projects increasingly dominated by software development schedules? Join Amelia Dalton as she talks with Frank Schirrmeister of Synopsys about ways to improve software development productivity using virtual platforms. (Synopsys)



CHALK TALK Confirma™: The Next Era Of Prototyping. Struggling with FPGA prototyping boards? Join Amelia Dalton as she talks with Juergen Jaeger of Synopsys about the Next Era of Rapid Prototyping. (Synopsys)

CHALK TALK Catapult C Synthesis Designing a JPEG Compression Engine. Amelia Dalton finds out that designing hardware with high-level languages can be both easy and fun as she and Stuart Clubb of Mentor Graphics walk you through the design of a hardware JPEG encoder using C++. (Mentor Graphics)



CHALK TALK Power Matters. Trying to tame power consumption in your battery-powered device? Join Journal Webcasts host Amelia Dalton as she chats with Wendy Lockhart of Actel about how you can use ultra-low power programmable devices from Actel in even the most power-sensitive designs. (Actel)



[click here for more webcasts]












IP Mates, IP Stars and IP Trolls
(Dick Selwood)

A mate in the pub.

It’s a regular problem: there is something you think you need, you are a bit hazy about what it is called, and you can’t define it precisely enough to get a decent hit when Googling. Then in conversation with a mate in the pub (translation: friend in a bar), he says, “What you want is a widget-handler, and you can get it from Fred’s Wonderful Widgets.”

Warren Savage, of IPextreme, is hoping to move into the role of the mate in the pub, or rather into the role of providing many mates in many pubs, with the new Constellations program for IP.

The idea behind the scheme is that, when seeking IP, you are faced with a lot of issues. The first is the very simple question as to what IP exists. Which parts of new design can be handled by existing IP? And what existing IP can make your design easier and faster to implement? If you don’t know about Sidense, for example, you wouldn’t think of using their anti-fuse-based one-time-field-programmable logic. But it might be just the tool you need to add flexibility to your design or to provide secure storage for code or data. Even if you do know that something exists and you search ChipEstimate or Design and Reuse, you may not be using the right terminology or thinking along the same lines as the developers of the search engines or the developers of the IP. [more]










You're receiving this newsletter because you subscribed at our web site www.ICJournal.com.
If someone forwarded this newsletter to you and you'd like to receive your own free subscription, go to: www.icjournal.com/update.
If at any time, you would like to unsubscribe, click here. (But we hope you don't.)
If you have any questions or comments, send them to comments (AT) icjournal (DOT) com.



All material copyright © 2008-2009 techfocus media, inc. All rights reserved.
Privacy Statement