- Obligatory insult for this newsletter: Michael Graves
- Bach's Air on G String BWV 1068 – Played on bottles
- Mentor vs. Cadence – DINI launches
Obligatory insult for this newsletter: Michael Graves
You are an architect. You are known for winning awards on buildings that, once built, are utterly dysfunctional. No ‘award winning architect’ designs something that is, like, USEFUL. Look at
Gehry at MIT for example – you don't actually inhabit or work in a building he designs. THAT would be a waste and bad form. As an encore to your architectural design ‘successes’, you start designing kitchen appliances to sell at Target. Most casual observers, such as myself, would consider that a step down -- much like going from the VP of ASIC Design at Intel to a job at Fry’s. Meet
Michael Graves, an award winning architect of unusable buildings. He designed a
teapot, notorious for three important reasons: It is beautiful. It requires a user’s manual. It doesn't work. “
This kettle looks great, no doubt. But it is poorly constructed and dangerous”.
Donald Norman is spinning in his grave and he isn't dead.
What’s the point? Well Mr. Graves designed a hotel-restaurant-office complex here in La Jolla called the
Aventine with the same philosophy that led to the teapot. Just about everything in this complex has gone bankrupt at least once, with the exception of the sushi restaurant
Japengo. The hotel, a
Hyatt Regency, (
the BIG Toaster) has struggled. I direct you to Google maps satellite of this complex:
Hyatt Regency Hotel Complex La Jolla. The hotel pool is just above the circular building in the middle. The pool has a **major** design flaw blatantly obvious in the satellite image. I will award a $50 Shell gas card to the first person who can identify the major flaw I'm thinking of. I'll select randomly if I get more than a single correct response.
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Bach's Air on G String BWV 1068 – Played on bottles
Air on Bottles - “Bach's Air on G String BWV 1068, as played by
Eskilstuna revyn, a comedy show group in Eskilstuna, Sweden, on 31 bottles, all in different tunes. Performed live on stage in January, 2003”. Pretty cool. (sound required)
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Mentor vs. Cadence – DINI launches
I would love to add my comments to the proposed hostile takeover of Mentor by Cadence. I'm an FPGA guy. My understanding of the products and finances from these two companies is not deep enough to spew on this subject. Truth be told, I don't understand the Synopsys/Synplicity/Hardi thing yet. I think Art got snookered on that one, and he'll find out in Q4. My comments about MENT/CDNS:
- Fister wears nice
shoes and nobody likes him. But he is a nicely dressed individual and quite intimidating.
- Wally has less hair than I do and everybody likes him. Not sure about the shoes. Generally when a discussion turns to Wally, the topic revolves around his niceness, great speeches, high intelligence, and small physical size. I am guessing here, but I suspect if Wally were known by his fashion sense rather than his technical/business competence, he would be angry. I have never seen him angry.
- Synopsys has 90% of the ASIC synthesis market and nobody is complaining about antitrust.
- From ENSUG: ‘The big box emulation market WILL become a monopoly’ Who cares?
- The price Cadence offered for the Mentor stock seems much too low. Can they really afford MENT?
- EDA will struggle to recover from the layoff bloodbath in Silicon Valley if this goes through. This is BAD.
- EDA is a sick, sick market. VC’s have gone elsewhere and few startups are surviving. Revenue streams are drying up. Fewer ASIC starts mean fewer users. Classically maturing markets consolidate. Always have.
- The old engineering cliché for EDA: ‘You use the tool that sucks the least’ seems quaint these days. I wouldn't mind returning to the glory days where that cliché applied.
- We may see a return to foundry-supplied tools (remember LSI?). Is that a good scenario?
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X-Ray reveals bugs in clouded Amber.
Take some old opaque amber that holds bugs from a few million years ago. This paleontologist has a method of using a really big X-RAY machine to create 3D models of the bugs within.
Dinosaur Bugs
ESRF X-rays reveal clues about life 100 million years ago trapped in opaque amber
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American Idol Season Ends
The latest season of America Idol ended a few weeks ago with David Cook beating out David Archuleta for the prize. I don't watch the show, and really don't care, but I have been to one concert by an American Idol contestant. More accurately, I have tried to get to one concert by an American Idol contestant. Local radio talk show hosts Jeff and Jer brought down William Hung to perform two songs at the North County Fair in San Diego, and I convinced Colleen that we HAD to see this. So we drove up to North County Fair ….. The place was a madhouse. There were thousands of people trying to get into the mall to see the show. By the time I found parking, we had missed the performance. I know this is dull, but it gives me an excuse to reintroduce you to one of the world’s most famous civil engineers, William Hung, singing
She Bangs. And then, some bad news:
William Hung Dies of Heroin Overdose. Oops, it turns out that isn't true:
William Hung is not Dead.
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PCIe PIPE Slowdown Core
The process of prototyping PCIe systems with FPGA's is easier if the frequency is reduced to a number comfortably within an FPGA's capability. This is troublesome in PCI Express systems since the clocks are generated using high performance PLL's and cannot be readily throttled. So PIPE interfaces in FPGA prototypes are required to run at 125MHz/250MHz for GEN1 PCIe and at 250MHz/500MHz for GEN2 and these are too fast. The DINI Group
PCIe PIPE Slowdown Core enables IP interfacing to the standard Intel PIPE at a much slower frequency.
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DN7006k10PCIe-8T – 6 Altera Stratix3 3SL340’s, 15 million ASIC gates
The DN7006k10PCIe-8T is a complete logic prototyping system that enables ASIC or IP designers a vehicle to prototype logic and memory designs for a fraction of the cost of existing solutions. The DN7006k10PCIe-8T is hosted in an 8-lane PCIe bus (GEN1), but can be used stand-alone and configured via USB and/or Compact FLASH. A single DN7006k10PCIe-8T configured with 6 Altera Stratix3, 3SL340's can emulate up to 15 million gates of logic as measured by a reasonable ASIC gate counting standard and this number does not include embedded memories and multipliers resident in each FPGA. One hundred percent (100%) of the 3SL340's FPGA resources are available to the user application. The DN7006k10PCIe-8T achieves high gate density and allows for fast target clock frequencies by utilizing the largest FPGA from Altera's Stratix3 family. Any subset of FPGA's can be stuffed and we can accommodate any combination of speed grades.
DN7006k10PCIe-8T
