I upgraded my version ModelSim and did my own compile.  It appears that ModelSim now flags as warnings departures from the VITAL LRM that it did not care about in earlier versions.  Examination of the warning messages convinced me they were all valid.  In many of our older models, we took some short cuts to speed development that have worked fine for the past 5 to 10 years.  Now Mentor, most likely in their efforts to continually improve simulation performance, is suggesting stricter adherence to the standard.  I assume what is a warning today could become a fatal error tomorrow.

In late April we began to fix the offending code.  There were 50 or 60 models affected.  To date, 14 corrected models have been posted.  While this is not considered an urgent issue, it is FMF’s intention to updated all the flagged VHDL models over the course of the next few months.  It is part of our commitment to delivery the highest quality product we can.

The meeting will be held at 6 pm, Wednesday, June 11, in Rooms 201B and 201C at the Anaheim Convention Center. Come and meet your fans and fellow bloggers.

Our good friends at Aldec have been supports of Free Model Foundry for more years than I can remember.  Among other things, they provide us with licenses for testing our models on their Riviera simulator.  This year they have also graciously allowed me to distribute Free Model Foundry leaflets at their both on the exhibit floor.  If you would like to meet, that would be a good place to get together or exchange messages.

I do not have a schedule but will pop in and out of booth #1600 frequently.  Leave a note there or email me if you would like to meet.

Vikash and his associates have put a remarkable amount of work and energy into their website.  I hope to learn from them how to improve some of my own projects.

Along with SOCCentral and PCBCentral, FPGACentral should be among the bookmarks of every systems designer.

FMF models are as open as we can make them. They are distributed as source code and are licensed under the Gnu Public License (GPL).

There is only one restriction: If you choose to sell, distribute or publish one of our models (or a derived work) you must also make the source code available to anyone at no cost.

Beyond that you may do anything you want with the models with no further obligations. Your rights to the hardware you design are not encumbered. No royalties are ever due.

Have you been clinging to any outdated tools or methodologies?  We all grow comfortable with what we know and we all dislike change.  But sometimes, we have to make the leap to something new or risk going the way of the dinosaurs.

Don’t look now but there is a mammal sneaking up on you.  Good luck in the new year.

As a source of verification knowledge and methodology, FMF is just a middle man. It is time for more direct conversations between engineers. To facilitate this, we have added a new Forum section to the FMF website. Here users can ask questions and write about experiences and leave comments for each other. I will monitor and jump in whenever there is an FMF related question appropriate for me to answer.

Now, if only there was a way to provide beer…

This left the systems house in a bind. They had long term contracts to support and upgrade fielded hardware but their model supplier had just pulled the models out from under them. What to do?

The solution should be obvious. Models delivered as standards compliant source code can never be withdrawn. Once you have them, you can hang on to them as long as you like. No further support from the supplier is required. This is the only reliable option for systems companies with long product life cycles, such as medical electronics and defense. But there are other advantages to source models.

Source models give you complete visibility into your simulation. You can see which features and constraints of a component are modeled and which are not. When the simulation does not give the expected results, you can compare the model to the datasheet to gain and clearer understanding of the part and gain confidence in the model - or not.

Should you find an error in a source model, you have the option of making corrections on the spot. With a compiled model, you have to first, convince the vendor there is a problem, then, wait for them to confirm the problem, fix it and send you the update. It can be the difference between a delay of a few minutes versus a few weeks.

Some compiled models will work with only one version of a particular simulator.  When a new version of the simulator is released, a new model must be obtained.  If you want to use a different EDA vendor’s simulator, you must get a different model - if one is available.  With source models, this is a non-issue.  You compile the model to use with any version of any standard simulator whenever you want.  And you can run as many simulations as you have simulators.  The model has no run time license to slow you down.

Free Model Foundry was formed in 1995 by three engineers who wanted to simulate their own boards but were stymied by the lack of models.  We chose open source models because they best suited our needs as engineers and that was more important to us than maximizing a revenue stream.  We continue to believe open source models provide the most value for engineers faced with performing board-level verification.  If you have arguments to the contrary, you are invited to share by leaving a comment below.

Eli Harari, founder of SanDisk gave the first keynote address on Wednesday morning. SanDisk is betting its future on NAND flash and Eli had numbers to back up his enthusiasm for the technology. Since NAND became chimericaly available in the 1990s, its price per megabyte has declined by a factor of 5,000. By 2012, the cost should be about one-tenth that of DRAM. However, NAND scaling is beginning to outstrip progress in lithography and may reach its limit at the 20 nanometer process node. That point we will be getting 256Gb per chip which may be enough to hold us over for a few days anyway.

Eli was followed by Kevin Kettler from Dell . Although most of Kevin’s talk was about all the ways of using flash memory to improve the performance of Vista, he also mentioned another interesting computer application. Currently blade servers all have their own boot disks. These disks do not need to be very large and could reasonably be replaced with flash memory. Doing so across all the servers in a large data center could save a substantial amount of power.

I heard Kevin give a different talk the previous day at Linux World in San Francisco. I was surprise to see Dell there at all but they seem to be coming around to the idea that MicroSoft is not the only game in town. In his Linux World presentation, Kevin talked about server virtualization. He showed a graphic of a server that booted a minimal operating system from flash and then loaded its virtual machines. This method could be not only more efficient but, also more secure.

Though not covered above, there are still plenty of people talking about NOR flash. The price is not plummeting at 50% per year but it is still going down. Talk of its demise is greatly exaggerated.

Since my job at Siemens was euthanized last year, I have had time to participate in a variety of workshops and conferences. While having coffee during one of the breaks, it occurred to me how different the people are at different types of events.

When I was in my teens and early twenties, I was aware that I was not a particularly well socialized individual. I was not anti-social but, I certainly did not seek out other people. I occasionally made friends with others with whom I shared common interests, electronics, motorcycles, and things that went boom.

Later, in my thirties, I began working as an engineer. This brought me into contact with more people like myself. We are characterized as people who would rather do something than talk about it. We are compulsive problem solvers (as long as the problems don’t involve other people). Over the years, I must have slowly assumed that engineers (and I) were “normal” people.

Standing in the exhibition hall at MemCon, it dawned on me how different people are. Many of the other events I have been attending are for entrepreneurs. To be an entrepreneur, requires working with lots of other people. You need their ideas, support, money, etc. Starting a business also involves a lot of problem solving, but they are different kinds of problems. They usually involve people.

So I am standing in the middle of this big room and there are hundreds of engineers all around me. Some are talking to colleagues they came with. Others are just eating or reading the conference schedule. Those moving about are careful not to bump into me.

At business conferences, this does not happen. If I stand by myself, it takes only about one minute for someone to approach me and start a conversation. It is never idle chit-chat, they always start by asking what kind of company I have, what is the product, the market, the business model. There is an exchange of business cards. If we have something in common the conversation runs a bit longer, if not, the other person excuses himself and goes to talk to someone else.

Then I started thinking about my job as an EDA manager. I made a point of stopping by each engineer’s cube at least once a month and asking if there were any outstanding tool issues. Why? Because if I didn’t ask, most of them wouldn’t tell me. After all, my cubicle was 100 feet away and it took 4 digits to dial my phone. An engineer would find it easier to try to work out the problem himself than explain it to someone else.

This also got me thinking, What are the chances of another project I have started, PCBcentral, succeeding? PCBcentral is designed to be a “social” site for people who design and manufacture printed circuit boards - engineers. To work, engineers must join, and share information and interact with each other. Can a website be made so compelling that it gets engineers to talk to each other? Never mind that I am not yet a competent web designer.

If you have the answer, please let me know.  In the mean time, I am still learning how different people can be.