Collaboration

September 30, 2006

Early Hardware/Firmware Collaboration

A few years ago, I was invited to a high-level design review of a new SoC. The proposed design contained an I/O block that needed features added. I successfully convinced them to replace that block instead with an existing block that had the needed features, had seen silicon, and had […]
April 30, 2007

The (not so) Exciting World of Documentation

In a survey I conducted of several firmware engineers, lack of good documentation of hardware was the number one complaint. It is because firmware engineers so heavily rely on the hardware documentation to correctly do their job. Some of the engineers said that wrong documentation is worse than no documentation […]
April 30, 2010

Principle 1: Collaborate on the Design

Over the course of these newsletters, I’ve been reeling off one best practice after another. Now, I realize that a particular best practice may not apply to a given embedded development project or organization. However, each of these best practices is rooted in one or more fundamental principles of embedded […]
July 14, 2010

Verification: Can We Do More?

A comment in the GABEonEDA blog entry “Accellera Works Toward a Unified Verification Methodology (UVM)” recently caught my attention: Silicon respins due to design errors not only have not diminished in number, they have actually increased. This is an indication that complexity has grown more than the ability of verification […]
March 31, 2011

Football vs. Football

When I say “football,” what comes to your mind? If you live in the US, you are likely thinking of American football. If you live in Australia, you are likely thinking of Australian football. But for most of the world, the term football refers to association football which is also […]