The well attended Mixed-Signal Technology Summit last month really demonstrated the tremendous interest our customers have in learning new methodologies and techniques for mixed-signal designs. I would like to share some interesting data points based on a survey from the attendees of the event. Among the close to 200 attendees, 73% were designers with analog centric design experiences. However, about 24% of them declared they were mixed-signal designers. It is very clear that mixed-signal design activities are very high and the expertise base is expanding quickly.
When asked about top technology challenges, more than two-thirds selected mixed-signal verification as the number one challenge. Designers are definitely looking for solutions in the verification space to address the ever-increasing challenges of mixed-signal verification at both the block level and the SoC level. On the implementation side, about one-third of the attendees said that the sharing of data/constraints between the analog and digital environment is their top challenge. With the increasing popularity of the OpenAccess based design methodology, I believe we will see significant improvements in this area going forward.
The survey ended at a high note, showing that more than 80% of the attendees would like to come back to such an event in the future, a clear indication of sustainable high interest. The whole event was recorded and we will put it on our website very soon.
We saw similar patterns in other regions as well. Recently we completed a series of Mixed-Signal Tech-on-Tour seminars in the EMEA area. Seven cities were visited in less than two weeks and we had over 250 attendees in total. Two interesting recent blogs covered these events well. One was by Thomas Enserguiex from ARM on “Blurring the Analogue/Digital design frontier”. The other one was by Mladen Nizic from Cadence, in a blog post at the ARM Community titled “ARM and Cadence Team up on Embedded ARM Cortex-M Mixed-Signal Design Solution”. In fact the demo described in this article is one of the most interesting presentations of these seminars. I would also like to thank Thomas and ARM for jointly presenting the demo at all locations.
If you are interested in this demo and you are attending ARM Techcon this week, look for a joint presentation by Thomas and Mladen on Thursday Nov. 1st at 10:30am. For engineers in Asian regions, we will also have similar events in Taiwan, Japan and Korea very soon. I will not be surprised if we see the same level of interest from those regions as well. Qi Wang