The cost of reliability - Just ask Toyota
In the automotive industry we have always talked about the cost of reliability in terms of the warantee expense that they incur when they have a problem. You can justify a lot of tool and designer expense based on the cost of one failure that requires a warantee fix. Turns out warantee costs are a drop in the bucket compared to the cost in sales and credibility being experienced by Toyota.
At Mentor … Read More
Tags: HALT, HyperLynx, expedition enterrpise, Reliability, thermal analysis, mechanical analysis, PCB design
I’m just back from a very productive SEMI-THERM Conference where we launched our new FloTHERM IC product. We had meetings with the editors of 5 leading electronics magazines to coincide with the launch, which was made at our vendor presentation during the exhibition at the start of Tuesday afternoon. Well done to all involved! If you want to see what others are saying about FloTHERM IC check out the … 
In an earlier blog I talked about the value of emulation in terms of providing direct project cost and schedule reductions that generally dwarf the actual costs of emulation systems. I have been asked by some to provide a “prequel” discussion, with a higher level description of the SoC verification problem and how emulation systems address verification challenges.
Rather than trying to cover the … 
Ten days left to the event at the Dearborn Grand Hyatt. The number of registrations is running close to the high water mark which was reached the last event. Join the people flocking to participate in this free conference by visiting http://www.mentor.com/events/transconf/detroit/
This time around attendees are spared a presentation or a paper delivered by myself. Therefore my personal preparations … 
Last week I went to Nuremberg [or Nürnberg if you prefer] to attend Embedded World 2010. I have been to this show most years over the last decade or so and it just seems to get bigger and busier each year. This year there were more than 700 exhibitors and in excess of 18,000 visitors. It is now definitely the biggest show/conference for embedded developers anywhere in the world. The electronic displays … 
EDA & VLSI Standards Focus Meeting on 12 March 2010
As part of its continuing program to reach out to global technologists, the IEEE Standards Association will be conducting a series of outreach sessions throughout Bangalore from 10-12 March 2010. The IEEE-SA will also visit key governmental agencies in Delhi this week as well. While there is a focal technical point for each outreach session, the … 
Electronics cooling involves ensuring that IC package temperatures do not exceed maximum rated values. If they do the probability of thermo-mechanical related failure increases dramatically. The accuracy of any electronics thermal simulation will be determined by how well the IC package is represented in the solution. These are simple and evident truths. As the leading supplier of electronic thermal … 
We are all familiar with the industrial revolution – a period where major changes in the way we did stuff (whether it was food production, manufacturing, moving from point A to point B … pretty much everything we did) impacted not only the economy but also our culture as well. So imagine my surprise when I heard on the radio that we are smack-dab in the middle of the next industrial revolution.
Gain … 
For those of us involved in the EDA industry, we’re all familiar with user group meetings. It’s a time to get together with fellow users of specific vendors tools, network, and learn from one another.
Being a product marketing manager at Mentor Graphics, I present at several of these a year. A common theme I have seen at these the past couple of years is the decline in attendance. When I ask users … 
Well maybe it’s because I’m biased. Maybe because that’s how think. But at last week’s DVCon it really felt that it was all about high-level languages and higher-levels of abstraction to address the “D” and “V” challenges.
The titles in the tutorial and session programs were pretty explicit. SystemC and C++ were covered in most presentations, when it wasn’t SystemVerilog or better; a combination of … 
John Wilson
John Ferguson
Arvind Narayanan
Boris Marovic
David Tatchell
Dave Rich
John Day
Steve McKinney
Mark Forbes
Michael Stamper
Michael White
Mike Jensen
Steve Collis