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Imera’s end is only a beginning

Imera’s is relatively unknown, but it was recently touted as providing secured communication channels between EDA vendors and their customers.

Imera has shut down its operations, leaving behind a number of customers (Broadcom, TSMC, Qualcomm, Sandisk, Infineon, Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor, etc).

Usually a customer requiring support means that some design data need to be [...]

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How Amazon is building a new computing resource marketplace

In cloud computing, AWS (Amazon Web Services) has become the de-facto standard everybody else has to measure against. Since 2006 it has proposed an ever-expanding set of services and features, from turnkey web applications, to CDN (Content Delivery Network), to automated scalability, to HPC (High Performance Computing) clusters, to general-purpose hardware provisioning in EC2 [...]

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Why Synopsys buying Magma is good

Synopsys recently announced they reached an agreement to acquire Magma. The natural questions are then “why”, and “is it a good thing”. Here are my two cents.

The “why” first. For Synopsys, I can think of a few good reasons:

 

Magma’s Talus Vortex is still a disruption for many P&R Synopsys deals. [...]

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Cloud computing is not grid computing

Recently I had a few discussions with people looking at leveraging the cloud. They were looking at extending their own compute farm by establishing a VPN to a public cloud and borrowing computing resources as needed.

With a compute farm, you have a fixed amount of computing resources. You rely on an engine like [...]

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Why EDA in the cloud will come from startups

By now the EDA community should know that cloud computing in the industry is inevitable. Most CPU-time hungry tasks (e.g., logic simulation, extraction, physical verification) in the design flow cannot substantially be improved at the algorithmic level. Thus we must rely on massive parallelism to reduce wall time to acceptable levels. And since nobody [...]

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Time for me to move to the cloud

I am a strong believer in leveraging cloud infrastructures. I have written about using cloud computing as a vector of new growth opportunities for EDA.

Not such big claim here. This post is simply about a recent experience that decided me to put in practice what I have been praising.

For the past decade [...]

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Mentor quitting on ESL?

So you got the news: Calypto acquired Catapult-C, the ESL synthesis tool from Mentor Graphics.

Calypto has been into low power (using notably sequential optimization techniques) and sequential verification for a while. And the company has always been very close to Mentor Graphics: it had integrated its verification tool with Catapult-C as early as [...]

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A practical guide to C++ serialization

CodeProject In a nutshell, serialization consists of writing data and objects on a support (a file, a buffer, a socket), so that they can be reconstructed later in the memory of the same or another computing host. The reconstruction process is also known as deserialization.

Serializing a primitive type like a bool, int, or [...]

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How to make software deterministic

CodeProject A program is deterministic, or repeatable, if it produces the very same output when given the same input no matter how many times it is run.

Refining this definition, we should consider whether a program produces the same result on any platform (32 and 64 bits machines, running Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Solaris, [...]

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Amazon’s outage, a step back for EDA in the cloud?

On Thursday, April 21st, Amazon experienced a large outage that took down hundreds of websites, including the popular Foursquare, Reddit, Springpad, Hootsuite, BigDoor, and Quora. The service was fully resumed only 3 days later.

Amazon released a full description of what happened. In a nutshell, Amazon shifted traffic in one of its zones from [...]

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