In Scotland, there is a traditional dish of pie and chips. But the pie is not a sweet fruit pie, like something Marie Callendar would make, but it is full of minced lamb. And chips are what Americans call fries (except in the phrase "fish & chips"). Traditionally this is purchased at "the chippie" (fish and shop) after an evening drinking too much beer. Do people ever drink too much beer in Scotland? Asking for a friend. So there will be pie and chips at DAC. But the pie is raspberry pie (or Raspberry Pi) and the chips are ChipEstimate.com. There really is a reason for tying these things together, but you'll have to read on to find out. ChipEstimate.com I got a little color from Nathan Mandelke, who runs ChipEstimate.com. It started as a portal and a chip estimation tool, but that tool is end-of-lifed. Funnily enough, back in the mid-1980s, I wrote a tool at VLSI Technology that was a chip estimation tool, called The Design Assistant. We didn't call blocks IP then, we either called them Megacells or, later, functional system blocks (FSBs). Of course only a few blocks would fit on a chip. This was pre-synthesis, at least in the beginning, so there would be blocks with a gate count, and buses that took up a lot of space in the days with only 2 or 3 layers of metal. You had to go round everything. When I went to open VLSI's R&D center in the south of France, my first hire was Jacques-Olivier Piednoir, now VP European Engineering for Cadence since most of VLSI's software team, which had since become part of Avant!, moved to Cadence. Jacques-Olivier took over maintenance of the Design Assistant, maybe until we end-of-lifed it too. I remember getting a jokey email from him when Cadence acquired ChipEstimate saying "I think we just bought the Design Assistant". The portal has 200 vendors and foundries, over 12,000 pieces of IP. The surprising number is that there are 46,000 registered users. There is a biweekly newsletter, and also other IP-related content such as videos and blogs, many sponsored by the partners who put out monthly or quarterly video magazines. As Nathan put it: We want people to come back for other reasons. At DAC, (ChipEstimate.com's 12th year) many partners will be presenting at the ChipEstimate.com booth (2134) but this year the focus is on reusable content. There will be live streaming on Facebook. There are partner presentations or interviews every 30 minutes from noon until 3pm each day, The schedule is in the table below. The First Annual Pi Contest There is a Perspec/PSS competition. In fact, there will be four each day (they are in the above table too), head to head. Cage matches armed only with portable stimulus, running on a laptop. At the end of the day, there will be prizes. I believe you can win a Raspberry Pi, while eating actual raspberry pie. Yes, you can have your Pi and eat it too. Come and watch. It's 15 minutes 4 times a day. Steve Brown, Perspec's marketing guy, explains a little more detail: The environment will be completely setup for the contestant. They will have an SoC, the verification environment for simulation, and a working Perspec model that generates a test that executes in simulation. The challenges of the contest is to modify the model/test to achieve some new use case with the SoC test. Generate the test, compile everything and run it. There will be guides and step-by-step instructions for these activities so they don’t have to formulate these actions on the spot. If you want to read the story of how the Raspberry Pi Foundation hoped to sell 10,000 Raspberry Pis over a few years, but they easily sell that many every single day, then I covered it in The Amazing Raspberry Pi Story . For more details, there is a Pi Contest Page . The Last Word i'll give Nathan the last word: We're like match.com for chip designers, connecting users with partners early in the design process. Hmm. Swipe right on the interface of your dreams. Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.Image may be NSFW.
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