Meet Louise Trevillyan of IBM and Justin Rattner from Intel

By Gabe Moretti, Editor

DAC is only just a bit more than one month away.  In this issue you will find two articles that preview the richness of information you will be able to gather at the conference.

Ed Sperling's interview of Justin Rattner, Intel's CTO, gives some tantalizing hints as to the contents of the keynote Dr. Rattner will be delivering Tuesday, June 10.  Although the topic of the keynote is digital radio, the article provides a glimpse into the direction Intel intends to follow in growing its business.  Along with Apple, another leader of the electronics industry has embraced consumers as the major market for corporate growth.

Intellectual Property (IP) and its value to electronics design is the topic discussed in this issue of the DACeZine Forum led by Ed Sperling.  Since this issue follows by only a couple of weeks the IP Symposium held in San Jose, I am sure you will find substantial material to widen your outlook on the subject.

Peggy Aycinena interviewed Louise Trevillyan, this year's recipient of the Marie Pistilli Women in EDA Award.  The article not only provides a compelling portrait of Dr. Trevillyan, but also gives insights into IBM, its culture, and its role in EDA.

DAC has been for many years a focus for events that take advantage of the large number of EDA professionals and customers that attend it.  This year is no different.  In addition to the official collocated events, the SystemC Users Group will hold a workshop, the seventh in as many years; ECSI will offer a workshop on High Level Synthesis; and DASC will hold a working meeting as well.  In short, there is so much to do and so much to learn, share, and even criticize, that you just cannot afford to miss it. I look forward to seeing you there.

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The DACeZine also has a Letters to the Editor section to allow for shorter contributions to the contents and directions of the publication. When necessary, answers to the letters will come from the appropriate member of the team (including our readers), since I do not (yet) hold the total knowledge of the industry within me. I encourage all of you to write, either a viewpoint or a letter, and state your opinions on matters that impact our industry, the contents of this publication, or, for that matter, the publication itself. Send your letters to: dacezine@dac.com.

I hope you enjoy this DACeZine issue and pass it along to your friends and colleagues: I am sure they will want to subscribe as well. They can do so by visiting the www.dac.com web page.

Rethinking Intel
The processor giant's chief technology officer (CTO) sounds off on configurable chips, digital radios, cheaper camera optics—and much simpler chip design. Things are about to get very interesting in the analog world.

Justin Rattner, chief technology officer at Intel, and keynote speaker at this year's DAC, sat down with DACeZine to discuss Intel's future direction and how that could change analog and digital design in consumer electronics. What follows are excerpts of that interview.

By Ed Sperling

Q: The subject of your upcoming keynote speech at DAC is digital radio. Are you talking about the kind of radio in your car or the one in your cell phone?
Rattner: We are talking about any device that receives electromagnetic radiation at some desired frequency or set of frequencies. Hopefully there is some sort of content at those frequencies. The radio extracts that information and makes it available. The transmit station, in reverse, is taking that information and modulating some frequency or collection of frequencies, and transmitting it into space. The view has been that, at least as far as baseband processing, these functions were an analog design challenge. From an EDA point of view, there is still a lot of perception that analog design hasn't been automated to the same point as digital design. My observation is that we may be concerning ourselves with a problem that will rapidly disappear if we can make a transformation to radios—both in the transmit and receive section—to essentially digital design and operate almost entirely in the digital domain.

Q: What you are suggesting, then, is adding structure to analog design?
Rattner: Yes. Communication is really a computational problem. If you look at the underlying theory, it has a mathematical computational foundation. The greatest advances in communications came as a result of understanding that there are limits to the carrying capacity of the channel and there are all these mathematical formalisms. If you start to think about communications as a computational problem as opposed to an analog computational problem, you realize there are digital means by which you can either extract the modulated information or impress the modulated information on a signal.

Q: This harkens back to the old argument by mathematicians that at the root of everything, it is math. But the problem is the application of that math, right?

Rattner: We had Ron Fedkiw, associate professor from Stanford, talking to the senior staff here. He does all these special effects for the movies. He did the water effect for The Poseidon Adventure. His Ph.D. is in mathematics, but he works in computational physics. It is the application of mathematics to physical problems. So the question is: which came first, the physics or the math?

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Hardware Design needs Design Management as Much as Software Design Does

By Dennis Harmon
Vice President of Business Development
IC Manage, Inc.

Semiconductor companies designing the world’s most complex technology products recognize that the intellectual property created by their hardware design teams can represent their most valued corporate asset, both in terms of investment and competitive advantage, in the same way that innovative software companies consider their software intellectual property to be the lifeblood of their companies. And yet a large portion of semiconductor companies have neglected to institute design management systems to protect and secure this critical IC design data, in stark contrast to software organizations, who have understood for literally decades that it is an absolute requirement to set up advanced software configuration management solutions to manage, control and secure their intellectual property before initiating complex software product development. 

Software design teams learned long ago that the use of such systems increased their productivity, lowered development costs, and shortened the time it took to get their products to market. While IC design teams clearly appreciate the competitive advantage gained through the application of advances in design automation tools such as physical synthesis, verification and design for manufacturing, they have been slow to derive benefit from the rapid advances in modern configuration management solutions for IC design. 

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Louise Trevillyan: 2008 Marie R. Pistilli Award Winner

By Peggy Aycinena
Editor of EDA Confidential and a Contributing Editor to EDA Weekly

IBM's Louise Trevillyan has been named the 2008 recipient of the Marie R. Pistilli Award. As a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, a recipient of the Outstanding Innovation Award, the Research Division Award, and the Corporate Award at IBM, as well as three Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards at the company, Trevillyan is no stranger to accolades for her work over the last 35 years. Her multiple patents in the areas of logic synthesis, physical synthesis, and place and route attest to the significance of her contributions to the technology.

Trevillyan's long years of service and leadership in the industry are also well known—General Chair of ICCAD; Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design; member of the technical program committees of both EuroDAC and the International Conference on Computer Design; and member of various review committees for the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the National Academy of Sciences.

That Trevillyan is the first woman to have served as Chair of ICCAD, the only woman within her technology area to be elected to the IBM Academy, and among the first group of women permitted to attend graduate school in computer science at the University of Michigan, is testimony to her lifelong courage in breaking down traditional barriers within the technology sector.

It was an honor to talk at length recently with Louise Trevillyan. Like so many outstanding technologists, the overall impression Trevillyan leaves is one of dignity, personal warmth, intelligence, humility, and a sense of humor.

"It was basically propinquity that led me to logic synthesis," she told me. "I started at the University of Michigan, as did my husband. After we finished there, his DARPA grant moved us to the University of California, but I needed a real job and decided to join IBM. I liked what they were doing and also thought it would give me lots of flexibility. We knew we would not be at Berkeley forever, and IBM was everywhere.

"I worked out of an IBM branch office on Market Street in San Francisco selling mainframes. My husband's research was in speech recognition, but when DARPA got out of that work he accepted an offer at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, so I came to work here as well and never left."

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DACeZine Forum

Value Shifts

Intellectual property developers say the real value is now in the integration of IP blocks; IP theft becomes more difficult.

DACeZine sat down to discuss the state of intellectual property with Simon Segars, Executive vice president and general manager of ARM’s Physical IP Division; Brani Buric, vice president of Virage Logic’s product marketing and strategic foundry relationships; Brian Gardner, vice president of IP products at Denali Software, and John Koeter, senior director of marketing for Synopsys’ Solutions Group. What follows are excerpts of that discussion.

By Ed Sperling

Q: In the IP world, there has been talk of massive consolidation as well as conflicting views that there will be lots of small companies that will dominate the industry. What’s really happening?
Segars: At any point in time, there is a natural cycle of consolidation. Arguably the industry is going into a downturn at the moment. The stock market is not being kind to anyone. At the same time, there is always innovation. There will always be startups doing things that the big companies don’t think are profitable. We’re going to see consolidation and new companies.
Koeter: If you look at the market statistics, there is definitely consolidation happening. MIPS acquired Chipidea. Last year, we bought the semiconductor assets of Mosaid. That trend will continue to accelerate over the next two to three years. I think it is a natural cycle that all markets go through. There is the initial phase where there is a lot of growth and everybody has a business plan that shows 10 percent market share. Then the reality starts to hit over time. We are still a very long way away from the maturity phase, but you’ll still see continued consolidation.
Buric: What we are seeing is a phenomenon shared by the entire semiconductor industry. The semiconductor industry is going through a maturation process, and you can expect to see the IP industry, which serves the semiconductor industry, go through a similar process. However, I believe there are two things happening in the market. One is consolidation. The second is aggregation, and the two are not necessarily the same. As we mature, leaders such as ARM and Synopsys can afford to offer more complete solutions to their customers. That is aggregation of the IP, rather than consolidation.

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