ESC India launched in Pune!

Pune as a IT hub is very promising despite the slowdown etc. We at CVC delivered a VMM training recently. And few weeks back ESC (Embedded Systems Conference) launched its Pune chapter. So the well known "student city" is becoming an icon city for HW design as well.

Cheers
Ajeetha, CVC
www.noveldv.com

Pleasant surprise from Mentor for QVP partners

Suddenly we get a call from our courier saying they have a parcel from the US from MentorGraphics. Having got used to many such EDA shipments, I thought it is yet another CD/Software/datasheet. But as with their products - they gave me a nice surprise:



Again - without boasting so much, receiving a plaque is not that unusual for us/me. But the style, elegance and the nice little stand at the back all well planned, thoughout is what made me feel like writing about it here. As with their EDA tools - Mentor knows how to make things presentable and usable. Be it Modelsim/Questa or a QVP plaque, they pay attention to details, Kudos to Mentor!

News of Cadence and what it means to the VLSI industry

So you heard the BIG news of CDN. Sure it is a big bang, especially for those who look at it financially and from Wall street perspective (after all that's what matters when it comes to $). However I wanted to throw my view on what it means for an end user, VLSI design community etc. Precaution: I'm not an analyst with financial background, market watch etc. My views are more from technology perspective.

Taking a step back, here is a nice definition of the word "cadence" from Dictionary:

Music. a sequence of notes or chords that indicates the momentary end of a composition, section, phrase, etc.

So what we are perhaps seeing today is a "momentary end" of a composition than a dead-end (let's hope that for the benefit of VLSI/EDA industry). Some random rationale:

• Does this mean end of all Cadence products?
• Does it mean my CDN tools won't run any longer?
• Does it mean all the high end technologies inside IUS/Specman/SoC Encounter/RTL Compiler/Orcad etc. etc. is all heading for a trash can?

Clearly NOT! Infact the recent stats indicate that RC has been giving a tough time to competition. Specman for all its critics of a dead tool/language is instead alive and kicking. The E-language is being healthily balloted and new additions are on the making (If you like to participate, please visit: http://www.ieee1647.org/).

We have the likes of Ted Vucurevich (http://www.cadence.com/cadence/executive_team/Pages/bio_tvucurevich.aspx), ApurvaKalia (http://center.spoke.com/info/p9RaNk0/ApurvaKalia) et al. at Cadence.



SimVision has been one of the strongest ever built-in debuggers the EDA front end tools have ever seen. Specman still continues to be the UNBEATABLE HVL tool with its debugger, constraint solver (Look at the IntelliGen for instance).

Anyway, to summarize: it is not end of the world for EDA/CDN and the whole VLSI industry that relies on EDA. Make no mistake - it is a strong beating and effects shall be felt at a large Richter scale.

Ajeetha, CVC
www.noveldv.com