Amelia's Weekly Fish Fry

The Engineering Long Game

In this week’s episode of Fish Fry, we investigate the role of continuing education in our fast-paced electronic engineering ecosystem. Mike Gianfangna (eSilicon) joins us to discuss how both mentorship and formal education can help address the biggest challenges of chip design and why Mike feels that we should treat electronic design startups like wineries.  

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Links for September 8, 2017

More information about eSilicon

New Episode of Chalk Talk: New Chalk Talk - Pegasus Verification System: Let Your DRC Fly!

The Great Shark Cafe

“Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...”- Peter Benchley, Jaws

What do 3D printing and great white sharks have in common? This week’s episode of Amelia’s Weekly Shark Fry of course! My guest Rich Stump (FATHOM) and I chat about how FATHOM is working with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute to create 3D printed video tracking devices for great white sharks in the California coastal region. Rich and I also discuss the details of the Great White Shark Café Challenge and the future of 3D printing in the world of oceanic research."

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Links for August 25, 2017

More information about FATHOM

Shark Tracking and 3D Printed Device (Blog by Silas Alexander - FATHOM)

How to tag a Jellyfish? (Blog by Monterey Bay Aquarium)

New Episode of Chalk Talk: New Defense and Aerospace Products

Board to the Future

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create a truly unique IoT design. As always, should you or any member of your engineering team be caught or killed, we will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This podcast will self destruct in five seconds… As we all know, IoT designs present us with a unique set of prerequisites and board design challenges. In this week’s episode of Fish Fry, Ted Pawela (Chief Marketing Officer — Altium) joins us to discuss the biggest PCB trends in the IoT ecosystem and what complex board design challenges will look like as we progress to the next generation of connected cars. Also this week, we take a closer look at some creative new beer names invented by engineer extraordinaire Janelle Shane's industrious AI neural network.

 

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Links fo August 18, 2017

More information about Altium

More information about AltiumLive

Craft beers named by a neural network

Janelle Slane's tumblr site

Plumbing for High Performance Computing

In this week's episode of Fish Fry, data center technology rules the roost. We can toil away at the world's greatest IoT design, embedded computer, or specialized IC - but it's the diligence of datacenter technology that holds the key to the success of our electronic design community. In this week's Fish Fry, we take a closer look at two different aspects of data center technology. Sachin Dhingra and I investigate a new CCIX verification IP recently rolled out by Cadence that hopes to ease data center interconnect bottlenecks. We also check out IBM's world record-breaking magnetic tape storage announcement and examine why it makes makes tape competitive for cloud storage.

 

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Links for August 11, 2017

 

IBM sets new record for magnetic tape storage; makes tape competitive for cloud storage 

Cadence Introduces First Interface and Verification IP Solution for CCIX to Advance New Class of Datacenter Servers Design and verification IP address server cache-coherency requirements

 

New Episode of Chalk Talk: JasperGold RTL Designer Signoff with Superlint and CDC

Artificial Intelligence and the New Language of Electronics

Move Over Watson, there’s a new AI bot in town! In this week’s episode of Fish Fry, artificial intelligence takes center stage. Did you know that two “dialog bots” at Facebook’s artificial intelligence lab created their own language? In the first part of our AI-themed podcast, we take a closer look at this new language and investigate why FAIR (Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research) shut the language down as quickly as it was created. Also this week, we chat with Kevin Yapp (Avnet) about Ask Avnet - the world’s first “AI-to-Human Digital Platform.” Kevin and I discuss why Avnet created the industry’s first digital platform to integrate artificial intelligence and industry expertise, and how engineers can get involved with the development of this beta program.

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Links for August 4, 2017

Researchers shut down AI that invented its own language

More information about FAIR

Avnet Unveils ‘Ask Avnet’ Industry’s First AI-to-Human Digital Platform

More information about Ask Avnet and how to Join the Beta Program

New Episode of Chalk Talk: GUI Made Easy: Modernize Your Embedded Application in Minutes

New Layers of Complexity

In this week’s episode of Fish Fry, we get to have our functional safety verification cake and eat it too! We’re talking about one of my all-time favorite subjects: cars! Fish Fry welcomes Sanjay Pillay (CEO of Austemper) to talk about functional safety in the world of SoCs and ASICs, how to tackle fault injection campaigns, and the future of the verification of autonomous cars. Keeping with our automotive theme this week, we also discuss the details of element14’s new IoT on Wheels’ Design Challenge.

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Links for July 28, 2017

More information about Austemper Design

More information about element14's IoT on Wheels Design Challenge

Heavy Lifting Hardware

It’s time to break out your barbells, chalk powder and protein shakes, because we're going to be doing some serious heavy lifting in this week’s episode of Fish Fry. Instead of letting our biceps and triceps do all the work, how about we pull in some heavy-duty hardware to help us out? First up, we bring in Lisa Minwell from eSilicon who joins us to chat about the high-performance computing demands we need to consider when designing for the Cloud and the details of eSilicon’s 14LPP IP Platform. Next, we’ve got Steve Mensor from Achronix who brings us the goods on FPGAs in the high-performance market and why your FPGAs are only as good as their software support tools. Also this week, we check out a new Kickstarter campaign called of the BitNation Space Agency that hopes to develop the world’s first international, decentralized, and open source Space Agency.

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Links for July 21, 2017

More information about eSilicon

More information about Achronix

Kickstarter Corner: The BitNation Space Agency

New Episode of Chalk Talk: MAXQ1061: A Turnkey Solution for Embedded Systems Security

Scaling the Analytic Mountains

It’s coming. He knows it is. It’s only a matter of time before it buries him. His story is not unique. It’s been played out in our industry over and over again. He’s suffering from BUAMODS - or - Buried Under A Mountain Of Data Syndrome. But what’s the cure for this ailment? How do we dig ourselves out from underneath this mountain of analytics?  In this week’s episode of Fish Fry, we strike at the very heart of this issue. Dr David Fried (CTO - Coventor) joins us to discuss how big analytics are changing the course of the semiconductor industry. We talk about the value of process variant experiments and how process modeling will affect the future of advanced 3-D technologies. Also this week, we check out a new 3-D prototype chip from MIT and Stanford University that combines data storage and computing in a single chip with a little help from multiple nanotechnologies. 

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Links for July 14, 2017

More information about Coventor

Coventor Announces SEMulator3D 6.1 and New Analytics Capabilities

New 3-D chip combines computing and data storage

New Episode of Chalk Talk: Diodes or Multilayer Varistors?

Driving Toward Functionality

In this week’s episode of Fish Fry, we take a closer look at the world of formal verification. Dave Kelf (OneSpin) joins us to discuss the mechanics of systematic verification and random verification and why automotive and other safety-critical applications may prove to be the most effective use of formal verification yet.  We also chat about the themes found at this year’s Design Automation Conference including why Dave believes that the convergence of HLS and System-C, FPGAs, and safety-critical applications made DAC 2017 one of the most exciting conference years to date.   

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Links for July 7, 2017

More information about OpenSpin

Formal Verification Leader OneSpin Solutions Unveils its Comprehensive Safety Critical Solution for Automotive, Other Mission-Critical Applications

New Episode of Chalk Talk - Insatiable Bandwidth: Why HBM is Right For You

Thieves at the Gate

We all know that cybersecurity, software piracy, and IP theft are becoming bigger and bigger problems in today’s semiconductor industry. But what can we do about it? Dragging our heels and pretending that it’s not a problem isn’t really working out so well, and those cyber thieves are only getting more sophisticated. In this week’s Fish Fry, we welcome Ted Miracco (CEO of SmartFlow Compliance Solutions) and David Locke Hall, author of Crack 99 - The Takedown of a $100 Million Chinese Software Pirate. We investigate what the semiconductor industry can do to help stem the rising tide of Intellectual property theft on a global scale. Also this week, we take a closer look at Qualcomm’s new advanced fingerprint scanning and authentication technology.

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Links for June 30, 2017

More information about SmartFlow Compliance Solutions

DAC Panel: Your Intellectual Property Has Been Stolen—Now What? How the Semiconductor Industry Can Combat This Global Problem

More information about "Crack 99 - The Takedown of a $100 Million Chinese Software Pirate" by David Locke Hall

Qualcomm Announces Advanced Fingerprint Scanning and Authentication Technology (Press Release)