Design Automation Conference - Anaheim

[AchimNohl]

Dear all,

it has been rather quite here for the last to weeks. It is because I
am preparing for the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Anaheim. If
you visit DAC, I would be happy to meet you at the Synopsys System
Level Booth #581.

I will also present in the "Exhibitor Forum" on Tuesday, June 15 from
1:40PM to 2:15PM
about "Software-Centric, System-Level Power Optimization for Android
Using Synopsys Virtual Prototypes".

After DAC, we will revive the discussions in this forum.

Best regards,
Achim

[AchimNohl]

Hi all,

Iqbal Arshad, corporate vice president of innovation products at
Motorola, gave an interesting keynote at DAC. If you read the
statements below (source: Richard Goering's blog) about "What did not
work", you will recognize that those perfectly reflect the problems
and solutions we have been discussin in this group so far.

Topic "Power Management":
"SoC suppliers think power management is contained within their
solutions. Nobody has a clue into what matters to the end user -
whether they can use their phones without recharging for a couple of
days. We had to come up with a proprietary setup just to measure those
things."
-> See group discussion "Less is more, system level software centric
power analysis"

Topic "Driver development":
"We have to rewrite every driver!" he said. "When we try to verify
them on our board, the logging is poor, we have to put specialized
pokes into the code, and there's interaction with system and timing
issues. It literally costs millions of dollars. It's a debugging
nightmare."
-> See group discussion "Continuous integration and test of hardware
dependent software Options" and "Debugging the [Android] Linux Kernel"
and others...

Topic "Prototyping":
"Everybody on our team needs a prototype ... It's so expensive to
build these things when it's not in a manufacturing state. I can tell
you emphatically, if you design a new chip or processor, it takes six
extra months because you have to put it all together." Not only is
prototyping a "nightmare," but system integration is "a trial and
error thing," Arshad said.

Source: Richard Goering, June 17 2010
http://www.cadence.com/Community/blogs/ii/archive/2010/06/17/dac-keynote-3-eda-gets-wake-up-call-from-motorola-droid.aspx

Video:
http://videos.dac.com/47th/iqbal/iqbal.html

Best regards,
Achim