...And the flea on the feather, And the feather on the wing, And the wing on the bird, And the bird on the egg, And the egg in the nest, And the nest on the twig, And the twig on the branch, And the branch on the limb, And the limb on the tree, And the tree in a hole And the hole in the ground And the green grass grew all around, all around And the green grass grew all around. — Traditional Camp Song My fourteen-year-old son just got back from two weeks at camp in the Sierras—with a slight sunburn, stories about everything from his camp name (“Private Pincushion” —don’t ask) to gut-wrenching food combinations, a newfound love of fishing, and pride about his cabin having won the “cleanest cabin” award. (My teenage son, with a clean room? Shocking what peer pressure can do.) He also came home with new camp songs that I heard billowing with the steam from the longest shower I think he has ever taken (because showers were limited to three minutes long and were usually cold). I don’t know how ubiquitous the whole Camp experience is to everyone. I always wished I could go to camp for longer than the weekend outings my Girl Scout troop took, but we couldn’t afford much more than that when I was growing up. (If you’re not familiar with the American camp tradition, this is one of my favorite podcast episodes ever. If you don’t have time to listen to the full podcast, start at about 30 minutes in. This is truly entertaining storytelling.) It’s a time that kids can get away from their normal home life and take their first steps towards independence, without the worries of school or parents or electronics or anything beyond having new experiences and learning how to reinvent themselves with a new group of people. To build loyalty and construct new connections, there is usually a campfire every night, where people tell stories, sing songs, perform skits, roast marshmallows… hmmm… I wonder if they make camps like this for adults… Anyway, I talked to him about the songs they sang at camp, and he listed a few that I didn’t know, and some were old favorites, and one of them was a variant on “ And The Green Grass Grew All Around ” —a cumulative song (like “ The Twelve Days of Christmas ”) in which you start with a basic short theme, and keep adding lines and hand signals until you’re breathless and laughing. Seems that some songs will never leave the canon. The same day my son came home from camp, my mom came over for dinner, and I tried (again) to succinctly explain what Cadence does. Because I have been thinking a lot about the new Cadence strategy of System Design Enablement, I found myself talking about EDA in a holistic way, attempting to show the entire electronic design flow, from wafer to package to board to system. * * * * * The scene: Meera, Gabe, and Meera’s mom are finishing dinner. Meera is getting excited about random stuff, as per usual. Mom is nodding, trying to understand. Gabe’s eyes are glazed over. He is gulping milk. Meera: Okay, so look, say you have a system, like a cell phone or a computer or a smart refrigerator or a car. The electronic innards have to be designed. Cadence helps designers create the good stuff inside these complicated systems. And in those innards, there is at least one board with chips and sensors and resistors and LEDs and other electronic do-das to make it go; that board has to be designed, too. So Cadence helps designers do that. There's software that needs to be developed to tell these electronic parts what to do—Cadence helps make sure the software works perfectly with all the boards and chips. Now, on that board are chips in packages with little in-and-out lines—the spider-looking things—and inside the packages are die that include processors and other stuff that do the magic that the chip is meant to do (say, do a bunch of calculations or store data or any of a thousand other things). And Cadence makes tools to design those packages, processors, and other functions on the chip. And inside these chips are teeeeeeny tiny—we’re talking nanometers—layers upon layers of transistors and circuitry that make the die do what it’s supposed to do. But before that circuitry can be etched on to the chip, it has to be designed; engineers have to write code to design them in a language called Verilog. So the designers use a nother set of Cadence tools to translate the code into yes/no binary “gates” that make the chip work per the specifications. Cadence makes tools that tell the semiconductor-making equipment how to stamp out the wafers and die for this particular design, too. And then… Mom: And the green grass grew all around, all around? Meera: Yep. Only at increasingly abstract levels. Gabe: Rolls eyes like a teenager. Can I be excused? Meera: And miss the whizz-bang finish? Gabe: … Gabe pulls his chair out, grabs an extra dinner roll and exits stage left, to go log into the game he’s been deprived of for the last two weeks. Note: Meera doesn’t see him again until the next day, when he comes out to eat every foodstuff in the house. Mom: So Cadence does all this stuff? Under one roof? Marketing must be a challenge. Meera: I love my job. ~ Finis ~ In other words, Cadence gives designers, engineers, and system architects the tools they need to design electronic systems, from the little silicon chips to vast networks of networks of networks. That’s it. And the green grass grows all around, all around. —Meera P.S. Stay tuned for more System Design Enablement!![]()
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