I just read an interesting paper from the 2004 Embedded System’s Conference (ESC) written by Gary Stringham. It is called “ASIC Design Practices from a Firmware Perspective” and straddles the boundary between hardware design and driver software development. It was good to see someone take the viewpoint of “how you actually program a hardware device is as important as what it does”. Gary seems to understand both the hardware design and implementation view of things, as well as that of the embedded software engineer. To me, that seems to be a fairly rare combination of skills, to the detriment of our entire economy of computer system development.
Monthly Archives: November 2008
The Details of Speed
I just read a fairly interesting book about the British Spitfire fighter plane of World War 2. The war bits were fairly boring, actually, but the development story was all the more interesting. I find it fascinating to read about how aviation engineers in the 1930s experiment and guess their way from the slow unwiedly biplanes of World War 1 and the 1920s to the sleek very fast aircraft of 1940 and beyond. It is a story that also has something tell us about contemporary software development and optimization.
Off-Topic: The First Snow is Here
The first real snow reached Uppsala this weekend, lots of nice fluffy slippery cold snow on the ground and on the roads and everywhere else. It really is nice to have snow again, it lessens the effect of our dark winters and kind of puts you in a Christmas-like mood, especially now that the Christmas decorations are going up in town and shopping centers.
I also had to bring out the car for some errands and transports yesterday, and that new snow was probably the slipperiest I have ever driven on. It also provided an unsought opportunity for the electronic systems in our car to show themselves… both the stability and traction control and the anti-lock brakes were activated several times despite my pretty careful driving. For some reason, I never really believe that they would apply to me. I know that ESP and ABS are really good for safety, but for some reason I am a diehard skeptic that never quite believe these things work as they should. I guess this is another example of an embedded system that works as it should. Which really should not be a surprise.
Off-Topic: Triple Train Trouble
I am a big fan of trains, I admit as much. I take the train almost every day to Stockholm, and I find that far superior to the stress and misery of driving a car or the poor comfort of a bus. I have always defended the railroad when people complain that trains are often late and unreliable.
But recently there have been a few cases of really bad delays hitting me… a couple of weeks ago, I missed a meeting at KTH by about 45 minutes after the train’s brakes broke. And today, we had an absolutely monumental delay — I arrived at my office some two-and-a-half hours late, which is pretty amazing (or abysmal) for a 40 minute train ride.
Cadence-Ran vs Synopsys-Frank over Low-Power and Virtual Things
Over the past few weeks there was a interesting exchange of blog posts, opinions, and ideas between Frank Schirrmeister of Synopsys and Ran Avinun of Cadence. It is about virtual platforms vs hardware emulation, and how to do low-power design “properly”. Quite an interesting exchange, and I think that Frank is a bit more right in his thinking about virtual platforms and how to use them. Read on for some comments on the exchange.
Shaking a Linux Device Driver on a Virtual Platform
To continue from last week’s post about my Linux device driver and hardware teaching setup in Simics, here is a lesson I learnt this week when doing some performance analysis based on various hardware speeds.
Learning Linux Device Drivers on a Virtual PowerPC
There are times when working with virtual hardware and not real hardware feels very liberating and efficient (not to mention safe). Bringing up, modifying, and extending operating systems is one obvious such case. Recently, I have been preparing an open-source-based demonstration and education systems based on embedded PowerPC machines, and teaching myself how to do Linux device drivers in the process. This really brought out the best in virtual platform use.
Off-topic: Crime Medicine
The Swedish national medical products agency is running a very cleverly marketed campaign right now to inform people about the perils of buying medicine over the Internet. They are running fake advertisement spots on television, mimicking the typical medical adverts found in the US (and the few other countries where such advertising is allowed for prescription medicine), with a trustworthy doctor talking about the benefits of this and that… and slowly going into weird land about how the products might not be want you think and maybe don’t contain the right stuff, etc.Finally, you are pointed to www.crimemedicine.com, a site setup for this campaign. All very clever. In fact, so clever that some people reported the spots to the consumer watchdog as being illegal advertisements… brilliant!
Grant Martin on the “Verification is 70% of the Effort” Claim
Over at Taken for Granted, Grant Martin just did a very good write-up on the “accepted fact” that verification is seventy percent of a chip design effort. It is not exactly easy to prove this point, but is it really just an urban myth that has gained credibility by being repeated over and over again?
Go over there to see what he has to say.