EDA Alert: November 28, 2006

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EDA Alert e-Newsletter
Electronic Design -- www.electronicdesign.com
November 28, 2006

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Today's Table of Contents:

1. Viewpoint: Shorten EDA Cycles With Storage Acceleration
2. RTL Power Estimator Zeroes In On Clocks
3. Suite Takes Aim At Unified Product Development
4. IC Layout-Finishing Tools Support OASIS File Format
5. Book Review: AC/DC, The Savage Tale of the First Standards War
6. Happenings
- IP Based SoC Design (IP-SOC'06)
- Int'l Conference on Thermal Issues in Emerging Technologies (ThETA'07)

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1. Viewpoint -- Exclusive to EDA Alert
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Shorten EDA Cycles With Storage Acceleration

Gary Orenstein, Vice President of Marketing
Gear6, Menlo Park, Calif.

EDA users face a number of challenging constraints when designing products and the process can stress their underlying corporate information-technology (IT) infrastructure. In particular, the data-storage foundation is susceptible to limitations in a number of common scenarios...

Read the complete story at:
http://news.electronicdesign.com/t?ctl=41513:8857EF

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2. News
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RTL Power Estimator Zeroes In On Clocks

Sequence's PowerTheatre 65, an RTL power estimator and management tool, now gives designers greater insight into where and how clock power in their SoC designs is being dissipated. The tool's hierarchical clock gating gives users more control over how integrated clock-gating cells are to be inferred. This applies both to common clocks and to enable signals that are shared across hierarchical boundaries.

The tool also incorporates enhancements to clock tracing for gate-level designs. List pricing for PowerTheatre 65 starts at $175,000 for a three-year time-based license.

Sequence Design ==> http://news.electronicdesign.com/t?ctl=41518:8857EF

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3. News
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Suite Takes Aim At Unified Product Development

With a goal of greater end-to-end efficiency in the development of electronic products, the latest release of Altium Designer seeks to knit the bonds between electronics design, mechanical design, and manufacturing. Altium Designer 6.6 expands the suite's support for the ISO 10303 STandard for the Exchange of Product Model Data (STEP) to include direct importing of 3D component data. This enables designenrs to access and share precise mechanical data.

As a result, Altium Designer users can now import 3D STEP models into their PCB libraries and associate them with components. This makes it possible to create accurate representations of printed-circuit boards that can be easily transferred to mechanical-CAD applications.

Altium ==> http://news.electronicdesign.com/t?ctl=4151A:8857EF

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4. News
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IC Layout-Finishing Tools Support OASIS File Format

At the 65- and 45-nm process nodes, file sizes will force a migration to the OASIS file format for tapeouts as opposed to the traditional GDSII format before moving to mask preparation and layout-finishing tasks. XYALIS's layout-finishing tools will be among the first to support the OASIS standard.

XYALIS is currently readying three OASIS-compatible layout-finishing tools. GTcheck is a tool for verification of OASIS file integrity. GTviewer enables users to display large OASIS databases with low disk and memory requirements. And GTmerge is an OASIS/GDSII file-merging utility for manipulation of large databases.

GTcheck and GTviewer will be available in January 2007, while GTmerge will ship in March. Other XYALIS tools will incorporate OASIS support as well, including a line of DFM tools for dummy-fill applications.

XYALIS ==> http://news.electronicdesign.com/t?ctl=4151B:8857EF

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5. Book Review
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AC/DC, The Savage Tale of the First Standards War
By Tom McNichol
ISBN: 0-78798-267-9

There is not a day that goes by that we do not hear about an on-going battle for supremacy in some field of electronics. Given my coverage of communications in Electronic Design, I hear about the wireless standards battles that never seem to end. Examples during the year are ultra wideband (UWB) and Wi-Fi 802.11n. It is just business as usual. In browsing my local Barnes & Noble book store recently, I ran across a book that describes the first ever standards battle...

Read the complete story at:
http://news.electronicdesign.com/t?ctl=41512:8857EF

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TAKE A POLL: In his November 12, 2006 editorial, Mark David suggests that given the success of digital audio (e.g. iTunes), video will soon follow. What do you think?

-- Likely: Consumer electronics like the iPod will drive widespread adoption
-- Somewhat likely: Given their size, bandwidth issues must be resolved first
-- Not likely: There are better options for viewing video

Electronic Design's Quick Poll ==> http://news.electronicdesign.com/t?ctl=41517:8857EF

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Archived Webcast: Getting More Out of Your Digital Oscilloscope

The digital oscilloscope has long been the most commonly used test tool on the engineer's bench, but most engineers use only a fraction of the power available in these instruments.

This seminar will discuss how to optimize many of the everyday uses of scopes including achieving maximum system accuracy of the amplifier/ADC, easy methods to spot intermittent signal problems, finding timing/jitter problems, developing insights from histograms of signal data, and troubleshooting noise and modulation effects using frequency domain (FFT) information. There's good advice for users of any/all makes and models of digital scopes!

Register at:
http://news.electronicdesign.com/t?ctl=41511:8857EF

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6. Happenings
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IP Based SoC Design (IP-SOC'06)
Grenoble, France
Dec 6-7, 2006
http://news.electronicdesign.com/t?ctl=41515:8857EF

Int'l Conference on Thermal Issues in Emerging Technologies (ThETA'07)
Cairo, Egypt
Jan 3-6, 2007
http://news.electronicdesign.com/t?ctl=41519:8857EF

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EDA ALERT e-NEWSLETTER CONTACTS

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EDA Technology Editor, Electronic Design: David Maliniak
mailto:dmaliniak@penton.com

Advertising/Sponsorship Opportunities: Bill Baumann
mailto:bbaumann@penton.com

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