The keynote at the 22nd EDA Interoperability Forum was delivered by Subodh Bapat, Vice President, Energy Efficiency and Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. Titled “Groovy Green Computing: Battling the Mushrooming Use of Power”, his presentation was not simply interesting, it was relevant to what many of us talk about and work towards – sustainability.

Sustainability, a.k.a. green, is a topic of much visibility in the world today. With increasing global demand for more compute power comes increasing hunger for energy. Sun and countless other companies, organizations, and governments are finding ways to curb the appetite. Subodh’s keynote was full of thought-provoking information such as data center power consumption increases 10X every 12 years. (Hmm. Sounds like a “Moore’s Law” to me.) Floor size of the data center increases accordingly, too. By 2012, worldwide data center power consumption costs could be as high as $250B, compared to $30B-40B a couple of years ago. An enormous data center – 750,000 sq. ft., needing 80MW of power – is being planned for Miami to route Latin American and Caribbean data traffic. And it will need a special power plant for itself! A power supply for a computer is only 60% efficient. (Here we semiconductor people are, lowering power consumption of chips and the savings are swamped by the power supply.) Cooling fans and other things also contribute to a computing system’s energy requirements. It’s important then, to analyze the entire system - and data center – to minimize overall power use.

Energy consumption will come under more scrutiny and government regulation. Several advanced and not-so-advanced techniques are being deployed to meet data center goals of getting maximum work out for the amount of power consumed and ensuring minimum power usage when idle. Facilities and IT departments – typically the ones who deal with power consumption challenges – are beginning to work together for better solutions. Creative ideas are being tested. “Hot Aisle Containment” doesn’t let hot air generated by server racks mix with cool air coming in. Putting a data center underground in an abandoned coal mine allows the earth to absorb heat without energy required for air-conditioners (although this sounds dangerous for workers to me). Pumping hot air from a data center through underground “earth pipes” also uses earth for cooling. A hospital saves energy by using water warmed in their data center to do their laundry. A wastewater treatment facility needing warm water to maintain algae growth gets it from a nearby data center. And my favorite is “Air Side Economization”, which is a fancy term for opening the windows. Data centers in cool climates need not use energy for air-conditioning when it’s free with ASE.

Subodh described three aspects to be considered together for reducing data center power consumption: proportionality + totality + agility. Proportionality is balancing workload with power consumption. Totality is looking at every component, not just optimizing one. Agility is being responsive to fluctuations.

At the end of his keynote, he said that yes, we in the semiconductor industry are helping, too. Our low-power design and verification methodologies along with advanced semiconductor technologies are helping make a sustainable planet for us all. Thank goodness.

I'm very pleased to welcome Karen Bartleson to our team if bloggers. She's a member of several governing committees for standards of the IEEE Standards Association, whose mission is fostering technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity. Hence, she'll be blogging here about standards issues.

In her spare time, Karen is the senior director of community marketing at Synopsys. Her teams are responsible for initiatives and programs that increase customer satisfaction by developing communities for EDA interoperability, higher education & research, and executive & employee communication.

All of Karen previous posts can be found at The Standards Game. Her first blog on Embedded.com is called Eyewitness news from the 22nd EDA Interoperability Forum.

I think it’s fun to write blog posts during a conference. In addition to giving highlights from presentations, I try to capture interesting comments that speakers make which aren’t on their slides and human interest stories that happen during the event. Here’s my eye witness account from Synopsys’ 22nd EDA Interoperability Forum.

We continued our playful theme of “Peace, Love and Interoperability” for the Forum.Titles of presentations included “Flower (Low) Power”, “Make (Verification) Plans, Not War”. and “Turn on! Tune in! Tape Out!”. Presentations will be available on Synopsys' web site after November 13, along with presentations from past Forums.

Several people wore tie-dyed shirts to the Forum and made jokes about how much hair we all had in the ‘60s. I saw some new faces and many dedicated interoperability practitioners who attend the Forum regularly. Synopsys purchased carbon offsets in a step towards a sustainable Earth. A gentleman from Jasper won a backpack full of prizes, and the lunch buffet was tasty and nutritious. There was a bit of action on Twitter as well – search the hashtags #EIF22, #snps and #EDA to see some of the tweets.

Subodh Bapat, VP of Energy Efficiency at Sun Microsystems, delivered quite an interesting keynote about data center power consumption. (It will be the topic of my next post as this one is getting too long.)

The first speaker was Rajesh Kumar from Synopsys who gave an update on the Liberty library modeling standard. One of the key benefits the Interoperability Forum provides is insights into standards like Liberty that give EDA suppliers a head-start in developing interoperable tools.
Neil Songcuan, also from Synopsys, talked about the HAPsTrak standard input/output connector that’s mounted on the HAPS rapid-prototyping board. Essentially all SoCs use some kind of rapid prototyping, and the standard I/O connector makes rapid prototyping easily deployable, promotes reusable hardware for future projects, and minimizes risk. This is the first time that the Forum featured a standard that’s actual hardware.

Richard Paw represented the EDA Consortium’s OS Roadmap Committee. This group produces guidelines for operating system and hardware platforms that help unify EDA tool support around common platforms. (It drives customers crazy when the tools they purchase don’t support the same platforms.) The guidelines will be updated in September 2010. Added will be SLES 11 (SuSe Linux) and Windows 7. Dropped will be SLES 10. In 6 months, the committee will review Windows XP, Vista, and the upcoming RHEL 6 (RedHat Enterprise Linux).

Dave Graubart represented the EDA Consortium’s Anti-Piracy Committee. He said it’s hard to feel the love when you’re getting ripped off. The committee estimates that 1/3 of all EDA software use worldwide is pirated or overused beyond the license agreements. Not scientific data, but troubling nevertheless for the EDA industry. It’s easy to find the stolen binaries so most of the 1/3 estimate comes from this, not misuse/overuse which is harder to find. There are potential techniques to help prevent this piracy and the committee will continue its work to solve the problem.

Cary Chin from Synopsys presented the current state of the 1801 standard, which was approved as an IEEE standard in March 2009. I’ve written a lot about this standard, and I’m relieved to see evidence of convergence – or at least interoperability – with the Si2/Cadence CPF (Common Power Format).

Ed Lechner, also from Synopsys, gave an update on the IPL Alliance which began 2.5 years ago. Users are proving out the standard which is based on OpenAccess and provides the industry with a means to create and employ interoperable PDKs (physical design kits). An interesting discussion followed Ed’s presentation about whether IPL Alliance members would provide 180 or 130nm offerings. The IPL Alliance has focused thus far on 65nm and smaller technology, yet one audience member contended that the analog/mixed-signal world is still at 250 or 350nm. Customer members will be able to bring their larger geometry demands, if needed, to the IPL Alliance.

One of the most interesting sessions at the Forum was a live, international demo of an interoperable PDK in use. 10 tools from 5 vendors were run using a single, interoperable PDK and a single OpenAccess database – with no data translation! “Far out, man,” was the introduction from SpringSoft that kicked off the demo (pictured here).

Frank Schirrmeister of Synopsys described the System-Level Catalyst program which accelerates the adoption of system-level design and verification. Among other benefits, program members eceive access to Synopsys’ system-level and rapid prototyping products for interoperability development. A hardware/software interface can have lots of bugs, so system-level design and verification is a necessary step in the development process. As Frank stated, in a system it’s the software that’s the differentiator. And so is the hardware (depending on your point of view).
Dr. Andrea Kroll from JEDA Technologies spoke about automating model verification. Model developers can spend 30-40% of their time in verification, then the consumer of the model can spend the same amount (or more) verifying the model before using it. The standard TLM 2.0 model interoperability (a set of API calls, modeling styles, and rules) comes to the rescue.
Bill Neifert, founder of Carbon Design Systems (system-level modeling & validation tools), talked about validating complex software on a new hardware design. He showed a “virtual system lifecycle” starting with model generation and ending with model deployment.

Grant Martin from Tensilica talked about their ESL methodology and ISS-Innovator integration. (I remember working on Accellera’s policies and procedures with Grant a few years ago. I’m guessing he likes working on ESL more than P&Ps.) In the future, TLM 2.0 should be standardized via the IEEE 1666 working group. Grant suggested some improvements that could be made to the standard, and said Tensilica is happy to help. That’s the spirit I admire.
Robert Freeman from Synopsys said, “It’s all groovy with VMM 1.2”. He explained that a methodology is essential for significantly reducing the time needed to complete verification while finding the challenging, “strange” bugs. (In the old days, we knew that verification was finished by looking at the calendar, not by looking at the coverage.) Since a few people in the audience weren’t familiar with VMM, it was good that Robert talked again about VMMCentral and its resources.

Mark Gogolewski of Denali emphasized the important of verification planning because verification is incredibly expensive and time-consuming. He gave a practical description of how to do planning with Denali’s tools and Synopsys’ VMM Planner. An audience member asked how flexible is the VMM planner for different architectures. Mark answered that he doesn’t write code any more (nor do I, for that matter), but his customers and engineering teams say it’s extremely contemporary, so he’s confident that it’s flexible. Another question for Mark was how well does the VMM planner calibrate coverage, i.e., how intelligent is it? He explained that it’s dependent on the coverage library you define, and it’s an advantage of VMM because companies offer verification IP now that can be dropped in quickly. Plus, the VMM planner does quite a capable job moving through the data.

John Goodenough from ARM talked about VMM for Low Power, focusing on aspects that make standards like VMM happen to the benefit of industry. As VMM has done, engagement across the industry is required, not just with 1 or 2 players. (I’d say that ARM’s ecosystem is witness to John’s wisdom.) He also mentioned that electronic devices today need to operate in the lowest power mode possible not only for battery life, but also to be green.

Ambar Sarkar of Paradigm Works said there’s a tremendous amount of code required to reach the registers in a chip for verification. Home grown solutions have issues. With the RAL application – part of the VMM standard – these issues are mitigated. Paradigm Works will make their implementation available on SourceForge.

Doug Smith of Doulos give some source code and examples of the new features of VMM 1.2. (Thanks to Doulos for providing each Forum attendee with a free copy of their VMM Golden Reference Guide.) As part of the beta program for VMM, Doug learned first-hand about these features and providing his technical expertise to the Forum audience again demonstrated the value of the Forum to its attendees.

The 23rd EDA Interoperability Forum will be held in Fall 2010. We’ll work hard again to bring solid value to everyone in the standards game.

We do an annual market study, which you're likely familiar with. When I started working with the Embedded group about four years ago, one of the first conversations (complaints?) I had was with the Micrium folks, who explained to me why their company's OS, uC/OS, needed to be included in our annual survey.

After a brief look at the study, it was obvious they were right. In the list of "Which OS will you deploy on your current or next design?" uC/OS showed up pretty high in the chart, even though users had to write it into the "other" box. So we put it into the study, and it now consistently ranks in the top 10.

When I heard that a new version of the OS was being released, I contacted the Micrium folks and asked them if they'd like to do a webinar with us, to teach users how to work with this latest version, uC/OS-III, and they agreed. And to make it even more interesting, the development platform they'll use as an example is based on ARM's Cortex M3 microcontroller.

That webinar, "Learn how to run the uC/OS-III real-time kernel on an ARM Cortex M3" will be held on November 18 at 2:00 EST (although we archive our webinars so you can view it at a later time if that's more convenient).

I just came across an interesting blog written by Ken Klein, president of Wind River. The past few months have been quite interesting from my perch, covering the happenings at Wind River. But it's seems to be more speculation than anything. The conversations that I have with Wind River's competitors always seem to start with "How can we divide up Wind's share of the market?"

At some point, Wind River has to stop supporting all non-Intel architectures. As much as they say it's not true, I find it hard to believe. But for now, I'll take them at their word. We'll see what happens over time. It's not the first time that a processor maker has acquired an operating system vendor, and I'm hard pressed to come up with one that stayed independent.

In any event, read Klein's blog, then let me know what you think.

This blog came from Maury Wright, the conference co-chair of EE Times' LEDs and Lighting Virtual Conference

Given a continued sluggish technology economy, it's really nice to find a market segment that’s poised for significant growth. The LED-based lighting market is certainly such a market. Already, LEDs have moved beyond their indicator-light legacy and are finding success in automotive lighting, signage, and backlighting applications ranging from mobile phones to TVs. And now high-brightness LEDs are poised to make a run in the general illumination market bringing improved energy efficiency and long life. The potential has engineers looking for design help and conferences stepping up to provide that help.

This week alone, engineers have three major events focused on LEDs and Lighting. On Wed Oct 21, designers can attend the EE Times LEDs and Lighting Virtual Conference. Meanwhile, the LEDs2009 Conference will run Oct 20-22 at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, CA. And in the Los Angeles area, LightShow/West tales place Oct 21-22.

What's the motivation for engineers seeking more information on the LED market? The answer is both market potential, and the fact that LEDs are really quite different devices once you get past the basic indicator usage. First let's take a quick look at financials. Databeans places the entire LED market at $5.3 billion for this year. But general illumination is a very small part of that number. But Strategies Unlimited projects that just the general illumination segment will hit $5 billion in 2012. And consider that the residential market will not have kicked in at that point.

Now let's consider the technical side. LEDs can bring great efficiency advantages in illumination as well as long life. But designing LED luminaires – lighting fixtures – is way different than working with incandescent or fluorescent bulbs. Design engineers must learn a complete new set of pertinent optical specs and figures of merit. And driving high-brightness LEDs can require three power supply stages. Then consider the thermal issues. LEDs don't radiate heat the way traditional light bulbs do, so LEDs require much more complex mechanical designs.

The EE Times LEDs and Lighting Virtual Conference will provide anyone with an Internet connection around the world a jump start of designing with LEDs. First, Carnegie Mellon researcher Inês Lima Azevedo will offer a keynote entitled "The Transition to Solid State Lighting." Azevedo will detail the tremendous amount of energy that we waste on inefficient lighting today, and then present a series of financial scenarios that project when a broad move to LEDs lighting might occur.

Following the keynote, the conference will offer four webinar panel discussions, as well as virtual booths, and chat sessions with peers. The panels include:

• Inside the LED: Specifications, Characteristics, and Optical Parameters
  
• LED Applications: Opportunities Drive Advancements in Design and
  Components
  
• Maximizing LED Performance and Efficiency
  
• The LED Driver: It’s More Than Just a Power-Supply IC
  

Note that is you read this after Oct 21, the EE Times LEDs and Lighting Virtual Conference materials will be available on an archived basis.

I received this blog entry from Niall Murphy, one of our regular contributors:

I spent three days at the Embedded Systems Conference UK in Farnborough last week. At these shows I sometimes hunt for the answer to a specific question and other times I am keeping an eye out for trends.

One topic that got a mention at the “Current State of MicroElectronics” panel discussion was the increasing importance of low power. There was also a paper on tweaking motor control algorithms to reduce power consumption. Low power considerations now matter at all parts of the design. Reduced network traffic, means that a wireless link can spend more time turned off, reducing drain. A compiler optimization means that the processing is performed quicker, and now the device can spend more time in sleep mode, which consumes less current. It set me thinking about whether this has any influence on my own area of user interface design. We are all used to battery indicators, but in some applications there might be scope for providing more information. Some cars display the fuel consumption level, to encourage drivers to drive in ways that conserve energy (i.e. don’t accelerate so hard). Similar indicators on a GUI could influence the way the user configures a device, if battery life or power consumption is a concern. If I reduce the backlight brightness or turn down the music volume on an MP3 player, it would be nice to know what percentage change I have made to current consumption. I am told that turning on Bluetooth on my cell phone drains the battery, but there is no feedback on the device which allows me to confirm if this is the case. Current consumption could be graphically represented, with maybe some time averaging depending on the application.

A few months ago, in an Embedded.com article, I bemoaned the fact that GUI library vendors do not differentiate between mouse events and touch events, and Qt was one of a number of products that I mentioned in that piece. At the Qt stand at the show I had a look at Qt 4.6 and was delighted to see that they not only added touch support, but handled multi-touch and have a mechanism for passing gestures to the application on OSs that support gesture recognition.

QNX had no stand, but Garry Bleasdale, a field application engineer with QNX, gave a talk on GUI development. The talk focussed on Flash as a way of making user interfaces a lot sexier than you can with a typical GUI builder. QNX’s GUI builder, Photon, provides buttons, sliders and other graphical widgets, but could never offer the kind of slick animated GUI available with Flash. Of course you have to get Flash ported to your platform first – or hopefully someone has already ported it for you. Flash definitely gives you the opportunity to make your GUI unique, and it is often desirable to get away from the slightly Windows-ish GUI that you get with most GUI libraries’ buttons.

There was a “Current State of Embedded Systems” panel. Much of the discussion was a language war, where panel and audience kicked about ideas about why something better had not replaced C. For a while the discussion turned to operating systems. Jack Ganssle, at one point, blurted out “Linux Sucks” in the hope of invoking a riot – sometimes the Linux evangelists get rowdy at these events. Getting them all fired up probably does little for the technical content of the debate, but it makes it more fun. While I am unsure of the validity of the “Linux sucks” position, Jack made a more telling comment, that maybe Android as a more shrink-wrapped version of Linux, might take some of the pain out of integrating Linux into an embedded device. Will Android become the one-size-fits all Linux distro for consumer devices. Maybe a bit early to say, but definitely one to watch.

My other mission at the show was to investigate SPI interfaces to graphical LCD displays. I occasionally deal with a client who wants to add graphics to a design, but their preferred processor has no built in graphics controller, and no external address/data bus to allow an external graphics controller to be used. If the number of pixels is low (sub VGA resolution), then there are a number of modules available from distributors such as Arrow and Review Display Systems, who both had booths at the show. The SPI modules are basically a controller mounted on the display, sometimes with a touchscreen combined, and an SPI interface. The SPI is incredibly appealing to the hardware designers, since address/data bus issues disappear. I was warned however that these modules are usually designed for specific customers, usually for a cell phone. If the big volume customer looks for changes, then the small volume customer might be faced with the same mechanical or electronic changes. So anyone who is building a medium or low volume product, which has a long design life, should be very wary of this otherwise appealing design solution. This is the sort of stuff I learn at the shows, that you just can not find in datasheets and marketing brochures.

More blogs from Niall Murphy at www.embeddedgurus.net/usability-bites.

There was a ton of great content at ESC UK in Farnborough. Some of the highlights includes a pair of panels (both moderated by yours truly) and a Build Your Own Embedded System track, similar to what's offered at ESCs in the US. Like the Boston ESC, attendees received an Atom-based kit running Windows Embedded.

The two panels covered the Current State of Microelectronics and the Current State of Embedded. Both were mostly driven by questions from a standing-room-only crowd.

The Microelectronics panel consisted of reps from NXP, Freescale, ST, and Imagination Technologies. The questions ranged from, "what is an embedded system," to" who will win between Intel and ARM." (See video of Tony King-Smith, VP of Marketing for Imagination Technologies.) You could imagine what the responses were. (Note: Patrick Mannion offers his opinion on Intel vs. ARM on EETimes.com.) Some of those answers were caught on video, while others were audio-recorded. When I figure out how to post the audio and video, I'll do so. You'll get a kick out of the "what is an embedded system" question. I assure you, it's not the answer you'd give to your mom.

The State of Embedded panel featured three of the biggest stars and most widely recognized experts in the embedded arena—Jack Ganssle, Dan Saks, and Niall Cooling. They were asked questions like what programming language will be most popular five years from now; what advice can you give a student looking to get into the embedded space; and why doesn't anyone care about Java.

The most interesting discussion arose when the subject of Linux came up. Ganssle offered a response that certainly raised a few eyebrows. His declaration that "Linux sucks!" began a whole debate on whether Linux really has a place in the embedded market.

One man's opinion (mine) is that it definitely has a place, but it's not the be all, end all. For the right application, it's quite useful. Just don't have it run the plane that I'm riding or running the servers at my bank.

I have arrived in London for the Embedded Systems Conference in Farnborough (also known as ESC UK), which starts tomorrow. I really enjoy coming to London. But I'm really excited about the conference this week. A little history, if you're not familiar. Our company, TechInsights, acquired the Embedded Systems Show (ESS) about a year and a half ago. Last year, the show ran with the ESS name. But at that time (last October), we announced that ESS would become ESC UK. And it's a lot more than just a name change.

If you've attended an ESC event (either in the US or in India), you know that we provide a highly educational conference, that's accompanied by an exciting exhibit area. That's a different philosophy that many events, some of which are competitive to ESC. In those competitive events, they provide the exhibits area, but really lack on the conference side.

We believe that if you build the conference right, the people will come. And that way of thinking has proved itself to be accurate time and time again.

To take ESC UK to yet an even higher level, we've invited some of our world-famous instructors to teach some of the classes here in the UK. For example, both Jack Ganssle and Dan Saks, who have been lecturing at ESCs in the US for more than a decade, will teach a series of classes here in the UK.

The session I'm most looking forward to is one in which I'm moderating a panel session with Ganssle, Saks, and Niall Cooling, another renowned expert who happens to be based here in the UK. The beauty of this panel is that it really has no set agenda. Rather, it's a place where attendees can come and get answers to their toughest embedded-systems development questions. Between the three experts, there's likely no question that can't be answered.

Check back for more updates as the week goes on.

I brought up the topic a few months ago, but was told that there were too many roadblocks. Now, a few months later, it was one of the hotter topics at ESC Boston—whether Intel will acquire Freescale.

The news that came out last week, which was denied (sort of), was that Intel was acquiring Freescale's wireless operations in Toulouse, France. But why stop there? Why not acquire all of Freescale? Intel certainly has the assets to do so. It would really make them the king of the processor hill, possessing its own x86 architecture as well as a significant piece of the ARM business. It also gives them a nice entry into the automotive space, one they've previously not played in, at least in a manner that a Freescale acquisition would provide.

I talked this up with some people in the know at ESC last week, and everyone I encountered agreed that it made sense. One person even took it one step further, saying that he wouldn't be surprised if it moved Intel in to the IP space, a la ARM. That could put them in bed with the FPGA providers, something ARM is just starting to wrap its "arms" around.

What do think? Is this plausible? Does it make sense?