Mentor Blogs

A unique concept most beginners have trouble grasping about the Verilog, and now the SystemVerilog, Hardware Description Language (HDL) is the difference between wire’s (networks) and reg‘s (variables). This concept is something that every experienced RTL designer should be familiar with, but there are now many verification engineers with no prior Verilog experience trying to pick up SystemVerilog … Read More

Verification, Functional Verification, Verilog

I don’t know about you but I read. A lot… It’s almost as if I’ve got an unquenchable thirst for information. It all started when I was 6 during a school break. I was bored and pestered my mom one too many times. In those pre-Nintendo days, she unceremoniously dumped me in my father’s study and told me to read a book.  I couldn’t reach most of the books on the shelves but my oldest sister had left her … Read More

fluid flow simulation, Engineering Edge

Taking a look at PADS is now easier than ever – we’re on the Cloud!  The full PADS ES Suite Evaluation is still available to download, but if you want a quick and easy way to evaluate PADS, check out the Virtual Labs. Here, you will have access to the full PADS ES Suite to evaluate, with lessons and exercises on simulation and analysis, design capture and CIS, and PCB layout and routing. No installation, … Read More

Unbelieveable! Don’t get me wrong, it is not the fact that pop-up ads appear all over commercial websites that annoys me; after all, we have had the same thing in magazines and newspapers for many years. Advertisements appear almost everywhere these days, the funding from which is an important part of many companies’ business plans. This is not the issue. The issue starts with the difference between … Read More

It has been interesting to be involved in the evolution of the GENIVI Linux Infotainment solution, and the progress of early adopters taking their implementations to market. At the GENIVI All-Members meeting in Barcelona last week, BMW presented some details of their 3-year journey to take a GENIVI 1.0 Compliant Linux-based platform into production, scheduled for later this year. The early … Read More

GENIVI INFOTAINMENT LINUX OPEN SOURCE

Pre-Silicon Software Development with Sourcery CodeBench Virtual Edition I recently got a crash course in hardware/software design workflows. While my software background is strong, my hardware design knowledge is very light. Any thoughts I have on Karnaugh maps or rising edge flip-flops are quite dusty. Even so, I clearly understood the problems solved by the new Sourcery CodeBench Virtual Edition, … Read More

virtual edition, Veloce, virtual prototype, pre-silicon, QEMU, Emulation, Vista, SystemC, RTL, Sourcery Analyzer

Aerospace engineers and enthusiasts, as well as science-fiction fans, are the latest Eagleworks experiment. The White-Juday warp field interferometer was designed and developed to record warped space and help scientists better understand the space-time bubble that would be required to break Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Albert Einstein theorized that a particle cannot travel faster than … Read More

Mentor Graphics, Mentor, Mentor.com, Albert Einstein, Quantum Vacuum Plasma Thruster, QVPT, Alcubierre drive, Aerospace, Mil-Aero, Geek, Milaero, Harold "Sonny" White, nasa, Eagleworks, plasma, Engineer

Back from my travels, so a brief post painting with my impressions of last week’s event … Design West [which I guess should now be called something different, as Design East has gone - preferably go back to it being Embedded Systems Conference] consisted of the conference itself and the trade show alongside. The show part seems to have been getting smaller each year. Although I have not … Read More

DESIGN West

The concept of machine-to-machine communication (M2M) is the foundation of the Internet of Things (IoT). Of the few core technologies that help facilitate this, zero configuration networking (zeroconf) is key. Zero configuration networking is what allows your personal, portable wireless devices to talk to other similar devices – without any additional setup required from the user. In the pre-zeroconf … Read More

M2M, mDNS, smart energy, zeroconf, Networking, RTOS

Power Aware Verification Course Modules Released I guess I could continue the puns on the low-power theme as a few readers may get a charge out of it.  And there is a reason I seem to gravitate to puns from the start.  The first chair of the IEEE 1801 committee and I exchanged puns one time that resulted in him shipping me a Pun DVD that recorded a pun contest in which one person and another tried … Read More

Low Power, Power Aware Verification, IEEE 1801, UPF

Volvo says that beginning this summer, European leasing customers will be able to drive and evaluate an upgraded demo fleet of Volvo C30 fully electric cars. Developed in partnership with Siemens, the cars boast a peak power output of 89 kW (120 hp) and a torque of 250 Nm. They can go from 0-70 km/h in 5.9 seconds. The cars are also equipped with a 22 kW fast-charger that Volvo says is the world’s … Read More

electric cars, fast-charging system, C30 electric fleet, Siemens, Volvo

  It used to not be such a big deal to buy a car and drive it for several years without feeling that much is missing. There were advances, of course, but models were more or less similar from year to year. That was then; this is now: In its annual survey of what vehicle owners want in their next car,  J.D. Power and Associates says there’s a lot of interest in device and application linking for … Read More

J.D. Power and Associates, Smartphones, buy a car, vehicle owners, wireless connectivity

This mil/aero geek is ecstatic that NASA has the resources, since the decommissioning of the shuttles, to start acting as a catalyst for the development of game-changing, space-related technologies. A couple really interesting stories have surfaced recently that have intrigued aerospace geeks, myself included. The most noteworthy is…wait for it…warp speed research! That’s right. You read that correctly. … Read More

SR-71 Blackbird, Skunkworks, Mil-Aero, Eagleworks, electrical, Milaero, Military, nasa, Aerospace, F-117 Nighthawk, John Applewhite, Mentor, F-22 Raptor, Mentor Graphics, Electronic, Mentor.com, Engineer, Geek, F-35 Lightning II, Harold "Sonney" White, U-2, Warp Speed

  Here’s an opportunity to help launch an intriguing company/technology. Mi Alerts is launching mobile technology that will send an alert to a customer’s mobile phone when the customer’s car is hit, damaged, or stolen. The complete Mi Alerts system will take photographs and videos of accidents or hit-and-runs, making it easier for insurance companies and law enforcement to settle disputes. Mi … Read More

GPS, hit & run, car, Indiegogo, Mi Alerts

Hi there This may seem a strange topic for a Process Engineering Blog but bear with me on this. Over the past few years, car manufacturers seem to be in a race to develop the cars with the highest number of gear ratios in them. Currently cars on the market have automatic gearboxes with 8 forward ratios. Manual gearboxes exist with 7 forward gears now.  I have also heard about possible future gearboxes … Read More

programming, AOI, data preparation, vPlan, bill of materials, BOM