Any engineering discipline done well should ultimately be self-eradicating. The key problems should be solved from the bottom up, and the creative genius of each generation should be absorbed into the collective tooling, IP, and best-practice methodologies of the next. Today, digital design bears little resemblance to what I learned in school twenty something years ago. For many of today’s bright young engineers, DeMorgan equivalents are something they learned in an introductory logic design class, but not anything they apply in their day-to-day work. They’re much more likely to be worried about whether the Ethernet … Read More → "Death of the Hardware Engineer"

Much has been made in the technical press about various approaches for automatically parallelizing general-purpose computing. However, there are occasional outstanding opportunities to create domain-specific solutions that can elegantly and efficiently elevate the performance of mission-critical tasks. Mentor Graphics has found such an opportunity in printed circuit board (PCB) routing with their newly-announced “XtremeAR” tool. They have crafted a system that can accelerate the arduous task of PCB auto-routing using up to 15 networked nodes, turning multi-day turnaround times into overnight iterations.

PCB routing has become a bottleneck in many board-based system designs. Increased levels of … Read More → "Parallelizing PCB"

As promised, we want to bring you the best, most important messages from the show distilled down into punchy, trip-report-worthy text bites, suitable not only for framing, but also for cutting, pasting, and turning in to your boss as plagiarized proof positive that you were out there gathering the key information that will propel your company’s embedded systems development for the next year and, just maybe, justifying that $200 bottle of wine carefully camouflaged on your trip report. Remember, if you can’t spell, edit in a few typos – for realism – with your own typical mistakes. Our copy editor … Read More → "ESC Revisited"

In deciding where to shoot your silver bullet, there are a variety of factors to consider. (Make sure your boss doesn’t read this part.) Is the conference in an exciting location? Does it have good parties? Are there excellent restaurants nearby? Does the subject matter of the conference match convincingly enough with your project that your manager can be persuaded to spring for the budget?

There are also smaller, more esoteric issues. (You can let the boss start reading again.) For example, if you’re working on high-reliability software in embedded systems for military … Read More → "ESC Survival Kit"