May 13, 2008 - This week, we did a round of improvisational interviewing with Aart de Geus – Synopsys co-founder, blues musician, and general Renaissance man.  Our latest feature gets his thoughts on the EDA industry, Gibson guitars, Moore’s Law, and “techonomics”.  

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Three Chords and the Truth
Aart de Geus and Synopsys go Quick to Four (Kevin Morris)

Twelve Bar Blues is structured improvisation.  A standard twelve-measure chord progression repeats tirelessly, and the experienced blues musician lays his soul over this monotonous harmonic structure like a fine linen drapery.  Aart de Geus, President, CEO, and Co-Founder of Synopsys, the world’s second largest electronic design automation (EDA) company, is also an accomplished blues guitarist. 

Blues in C
I (C) Measures 1-4:
The tonic orients the ear, providing a firm foundation of reference.  In traditional blues, it is repeated for the first four bars of the sequence, setting up “home base” for the listener’s mind.  When Aart de Geus co-founded Synopsys over two decades ago, logic synthesis was the tonic - the root chord upon which the engineering-centric company was founded.  Logic synthesis set the key values of creativity, learning, and technological innovation that hardened the fledgling company so that it could survive and thrive in the tempestuous torments of two decades of The Moore’s Law blues.

“I played guitar starting around 14 years old,” begins de Geus.  “It was very much around the campfire, scouts, gospel, Bob Dylan – those types of things.  Then, somewhat by accident, I went to a couple of great blues concerts in Switzerland, where I grew up.  It just hit me – a guy by the name of T-bone Walker, who was considered one of the fathers of Blues, was performing there.  It was a big concert, not a small venue like a bar or anything, and after that I really never played anything else.” [more]

Avoiding Failure Analysis Paralysis
Cadence Describes the DFM-Diagnostics Link (Bryon Moyer)

Back when I was a product engineer working on bipolar PALs (oops – I mean, PAL® devices), one of my main activities was figuring out what was wrong. That was most of the job of a product engineer: fix what’s broken. You don’t spend any time working on the stuff that’s working, you work on what isn’t working. Assuming it’s a chip that’s wrong, the process would typically start with a trip into the testing area to put a part on the tester and datalog it to see some evidence of things going awry. Armed with that, the next job was to spread a big schematic out on a table and start looking at the circuits, figuring out what could be causing the problem. You’d come up with a couple scenarios, and next you’d have to look in the actual chip.

Of course, in order to look at the chip, we had to spread a big layout sheet on a table to trace out where the circuits were physically located. Then we’d know where to look. The chip would have to be decapped – I could do that myself if it was a CERDIP (ceramic packaging, where you could pop off the top); otherwise you needed to go to one of those scary guys that knew just a bit too much about chemistry (and whom you wanted to keep happy with occasional gifts of jerky or sunflower seeds) to have a hole etched in the plastic. Hopefully that was enough, and then you could go into the lab and use microscopes and microprobes and oscilloscopes and such to poke through dielectric layers, perhaps cut a metal line to get to something below, and with any luck you’d identify a problem that could be fixed. In the worst case you had to go back to Scary Guy for more delayering, or perhaps a SEM session. Or – yikes – chemical analysis. It was all seat-of-the-pants, using forensic techniques worthy of CSI – Jurassic Edition, and you let your data and observations tell you what the next step should be. [more]

Almost Instant Replay
Mentor Announces Codelink for Debugging Processor-Driven Tests
(Bryon Moyer)

It’s 4th and goal, 0:15 to go in the last quarter. The ball is snapped, the quarterback steps back, finds his receiver, and throws. Seeing the play develop, the defender runs to cover the receiver. They both jump in an aerial pas de deux; the ball dances elusively into the air, spins tantalizingly near outstretched fingertips, and falls harmlessly to the ground. While the defender gyrates around in a rather improbable new display of exultation that he hopes will sweep the nation, the receiver cries interference and looks to the referees for justice. The referees call upstairs for a replay so they can judge what happened. To their amazement, they’re told, “Um… we weren’t filming. We can’t see what happened.”

“So, what are we supposed to do?? How are we going to resolve this?”

“Well, I know this is going to sound strange, but the teams are going to have to completely replay the second half, exactly as it happened the first time, so that we can watch that pass more closely.” [more]

The Spirit of Standardization
IP Re-use Takes Center Stage (Kevin Morris)

Edgar was seldom in the office – even before the current trends in telecommuting and working from home exploded.  He’d waltz through the cube aisles looking important at least once or twice per week – tossing a gigantic notebook with DRAFT stamped on the top onto the desk of some unsuspecting victim.  The target would immediately activate his defenses – talking about how he was behind on his part of the project and was almost critical path right now.  Edgar wasn’t fazed.  Sure, reviewing this draft of the spec might impact this one project at this one company – but Edgar was in this for the Greater Good.  Edgar was a big picture guy – no, more than that.  Edgar was a chronic career committee member.

Every engineering organization has at least one Edgar – the engineer that volunteers for every consortium and “working group” that comes along.  Most of these efforts will go nowhere – and that’s just the way Edgar likes it.  Specifications will be reviewed and modified in perpetuity. Power struggles will ensue amongst idealistically opposing factions debating semantics of corner cases that no real-world scenario will ever see, and corporate one-upsmen will work to be sure that nothing happens that will compromise competitive advantage or benefit a rival. [more]

Accommodating Change
Cadence Announces a Front-End ECO Tool (Bryon Moyer)

Someday someone will invent a useful engineering feature that can be plugged into telephone and email systems. Once an engineering project gets within a certain range of being complete, it will completely disconnect marketing so that they will have no way of radioing in feature changes at the last minute. But until that time, you know it’s gonna happen. And then you’re going to have to fight the fight over whether the change is worth it. [more]

Making Quality Everyone’s Business
A Quick Look at isQED (Bryon Moyer)

Nestled amongst the big noisy conventions like CES, ISSCC, and DAC can be found some more modest, highly focused conferences. These shows may cast a smaller shadow, but they may also benefit from the lack of attendant hoopla, since marketing pays less attention and engineers can focus on the business at hand. One such show that just took place was isQED, or the International Symposium on Quality Electronics Design. Now in its ninth year, isQED focuses on the interactions between design, test, quality, and manufacturing disciplines in the effort to improve such aspects as yield, quality, and robustness. [more]

Methods for Reducing Marketing Jitter Through Filtering of Marketing Noise in Conference Presentations (Bryon Moyer)

Related Applications
None.

Field of the Invention
Way out in left field.

Background of the Invention
For purposes of gathering together for reasons including but not limited to sharing information, making commercial announcements, receiving training, professional networking, escaping a nagging spouse or children, and racking up frequent flier miles, it is common for engineering professionals to attend conferences or conventions. [more]

Attacking Abuses of Power - Part 2
(Bryon Moyer)

A few weeks ago, we started looking at ways of reducing power consumption when designing SoCs. We divided the world into the front-end, where the big payoff is, and the back-end, with useful techniques that have less dramatic impact. We looked at architecture and system design, hardware/software allocation and C-to-RTL, multicore, Multi-Voltage Supply (MVS), power switching, Dynamic Voltage/Frequency Scaling (DVFS), and Adaptive Voltage Scaling (AVS). These are techniques that can give power savings in the range of 30-50%. Having addressed those, there are numerous back-end techniques that can give more modest, but nonetheless valuable, power savings. We’ll look at some of those here, not necessarily in any specific order. The savings from these techniques will vary widely by application but will generally be in the 5-15% range. [more]

ISSCC Processor Fest
(Bryon Moyer)

There are some places it seems everyone wants to be. The Oscars. An inaugural ball. Mardi Gras. New Years in Times Square. (OK, pre-War on Terror.) Well there was a new member of this list last week that might not have sprung to mind immediately: the microprocessor session at ISSCC, packed to the gills. Four new processors were presented, plus one process migration to 45 nm. The bragging rights on such chips are typically all about performance (or performance efficiency), and everyone fusses over clock rates and bus sizes and various and sundry other numbers, but, in this article, we’ll focus away from the distracting lure of feeds and speeds. Anyone can look up the numbers in a datasheet, and the techno-paparazzi have assuredly posted pictures of the most lurid ones already. So we’ll focus on things that we found interesting in the new processors, assuming that what interests us will interest you. [more]

Bigger and Better Storage
(Bryon Moyer)

I don’t know what it is about people, but we seem to excel at accumulating more and more stuff and needing more and more space to put it. And it used to be that we only did it in the real world, amassing real things and then ensconcing them in public storage units until time to move to a new house – which means moving the stuff to a new public storage unit. But now we’re doing it in the virtual world as well, and we keep needing more room to put stuff. One place we store stuff is solid-state non-volatile memory. Yeah, we still use hard disks. But if solid state technology keeps on at the current rate, we can soon reach the much-desired goal of a solid state hard drive. [more]