OM Director's Update from Lawrence Tong, International Director

Ali Geake, Internal Communications Director, discusses the change living in another culture has had on her life and outlook.

A single mother finds hope through a Self Help Group and is sharing the good news.

Bahia Blanca, Argentina :: Crewmembers mobilise a group of young believers to take a step towards serving God.

People in Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe are still recovering from Cyclone Idai. OM is responding to the needs in different communities in these countries.

A Bible app provides access to God's Word for thousands of Kurds.

Rachel reaches out to Arabs through a mums and toddlers group based in her community in England.

The leader said: "This is a secret; if we started to teach about Jesus in our mosques then we might as well open churches."

In partnership with local churches, a team shared the good news of Easter through music with all kinds of people in Austria.

Ariela left Argentina to serve Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and ended up going on a journey she never could have imagined.

OM Director's Update from Lawrence Tong

“As I watched the ending scene (that lasted about three minutes) I thought about the “happy ending” notion,” says Ava. “Is it real or is it a fairy tale? A utopia created by Hollywood to give their viewers a false sense of hope in the reality of a broken world? And so, I said to myself: I believe in happy endings.”

The Bailie family serve with their local church as part of OM in Ireland's Philippian Project.

In 2008, OM Ireland purchased Lacken House to be their headquarters. Ten years and hundreds of people later, the team continues to minister from the heart of Ireland.

In 2019, OM Ireland hosted its largest St. Patrick's outreach.

Workers Berni and Carla are passionate about reaching the East of Turkey and encouraged by spiritual growth happening there.

How prayer shaped the history of OM and how important prayer still is today.

Lima, Peru :: A Logos Hope team joins an inspirational pastor ministering to the children of criminals.

虽然不能光明正大地谈论耶稣,短宣队仍可循其他管道成为上帝手中的器皿.

"[The village] didn’t know about the cyclone." OM worker Macdonald tells how his village experienced Cyclone Idai.

The journey of a young Albanian girl from the Roma and Gypsy community who went from being a troubled teenager to excitedly following Jesus!

Montevideo, Uruguay :: A Logos Hope crewmember relies on God for strength and the words to say to disruptive inmates at a prison.

Saskia perseveres through language learning and connects with a young Albanian girl who becomes a follower of Jesus.

Realising the need for biblical role models, OM partnered with a local church to send a couple, Kelvin and Florence, to Crocodile Island as missionaries.

Santa Cruz, Bolivia :: God surprises a Logos Hope crewmember with birthday treats and new perspectives as she serves with a team on shore.

Montevideo, Uruguay :: Logos Hope returns to the water after annual maintenance and her crew prepares to resume the floating ministry.

Jose, an Argentinian worker serving in Southeast Asia, tells of how he entered overseas service and what he has seen God do through his not-so-typical ministry.

Rosario, Argentina :: When their programme for the day gets cancelled, crew take to the streets to share their faith with those they meet.

Finally, sanity.  Concerned about the level of electronic waste created by discarded phone chargers, the European Commission has told mobile phone manufacturers that they must adopt a standard.  This will hopefully have the additional advantage of reducing blood pressures if we no longer need to rummage in our desk drawers frantically searching for the right charger. 

I wonder whether manufacturers would have voluntarily adopted a standard without external influence.  The choice of how to wire our "wireless" appliances seems to offer so little differentiation, and standards are so freely available that I am surprised that this hasn't happened sooner. 

Unfortunately, there are few parallels in the EDA/manufacturability world.  EDA products derive a significant part of their differentiation from the range and types of data that they can connect to, particularly in the case of enabling information such as library and technology files. 

The good news is that technology file standards are becoming available that could replace what were once proprietary formats, and there is motivation to adopt the standards because our foundry partners (as well as our customers) evidently recognize the value of common formats.  Whether the foundries can agree among themselves on common formats remains to be seen. 

When something big and expensive fails, we usually hear about it in the headlines.  Recent examples include the launch failure of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory and the setback at CERN, apparently caused by a dry solder joint, that resulted in a 12-month delay in their search for the Higgs particle. 

When something small and cheap fails, it rarely makes the headlines.  Unless, of course, it causes something big and expensive to fail - like a particle accelerator, a satellite or perhaps a semiconductor company. 

In the semiconductor industry, we have built up a system of safeguards and checks to minimize the risk of failure.  We apply these checks throughout the design process, and as a series of sign off steps that precede manufacture. 

I would be interested to understand whether other industries - e.g. avionics or automotive - have built up a similar infrastructure of pre-manufacturing sign off checks.  Do they rely on modeling during design, pre-manufacturing sign off or a combination of both?  Is there anything that we can learn from other industries?  Is there anything that they can learn from us? 

A few customers have recently asked whether we can provide schematic-based ERC checks.  This is no doubt spurred by a recent product announcement by one of our competitors.  No - I'm not going to say who, and I'm not going to provide a link to their product page. 

We have had layout-based ERC checks as part of our Assura physical verification product since release 3.2 became available last August.  A quick check with our field AEs revealed that it's also possible to use Assura for ERC checks based on netlists and schematics, as well as layouts.  One of our AEs has put some instructions together, and it actually looks pretty easy.  Ask your friendly Cadence physical verification expert for a copy of the document, and tell them to send out an email on the Cadence internal Assura AE email alias if they can't find it right away.  While you're at it, ask about the 10x performance improvement that we made in Assura 3.2. 

It's interesting that our competitor has made a separate product from this when we give it away for free with Assura.  Marketing, I guess. 

The buzz about showing and paying for value in EDA has been building over the past few years. People have complained about the high cost of tools and EDA vendors have complained about not getting enough value from the technology that can then be re-invested in the next generation tools. The same complaints can be heard from the foundries regarding their wafer pricing

Companies have tried royalty-based models before in the past (e.g., $/wafer or even profit sharing). But it hasn't been sticky. Is the industry ready for a new model?  I think sharing in the upside and potential downside of a particular design from inception to volume is fair. But it also would mean that EDA companies and foundries would have to participate even earlier (and later) in the product lifecycle - from design spec/marketing through product introduction.

That's a pretty big change that goes beyond just the business model. But maybe at 32nm and below, where designs cost upwards of $75M to bring to market, this type of collaboration and risk/reward model is required and desired

In my last post I talked about the layout, schematic and netlist ERC capabilities of Assura. 

"But", I hear you ask, "is it programmable?"

One of the characteristics that makes Assura such a natural fit within the Virtuoso custom design platform is that it shares the platform's programming language, SKILL.  So yes, it's programmable - in the very same language that your Pcells are written in. 

In a recent post, I hinted at a significant performance improvement in Assura. 

Our R&D team focused on performance improvements in the 3.2 release, which was shipped last August.  Based on our suite of performance benchmarks, we achieved an overall 10x performance boost.  This comes from two fundamental improvements: an overall 3.5x boost in single processor performance, and an overall 2.8x performance boost from using four CPUs in a multiprocessor configuration. 

Your mileage may vary, of course.  Our test suite includes a variety of designs and processes - LVS testcases as well as DRC.  We typically noticed the most significant performance improvement on large designs that previously ran for many hours. 

This is a maintenance upgrade from the previous release, so there's no risk if you want to download the latest version just to kick the tires.  It will probably save you some time. 

I've been blogging a lot about Assura recently, so I thought I would continue by talking about rule decks. 

Inside Cadence, we maintain a database that shows which foundries support which process for which products.  This means that we can quickly give you an answer if you are considering using a new process or foundry, and you want to know whether Assura is supported.  Your friendly local Cadence physical verification AE has access to this information and should be able to answer your questions about rule deck support. 

Our Assura R&D team is constantly working with the foundries to help update existing rule decks and create new ones.  But with all due respect to our foundry partners, their field support teams are not always aware of the latest efforts on rule deck creation and support. 

Of course, it's important to check the status of Assura support with your foundry.  This has the added benefit to Cadence that it lets them know that you're using Assura.  But please also double-check with your Cadence AE, who can ping me to make sure that you're getting the latest information. 

"The number of watchmen required to watch the watchmen watching the watchmen tends to double every 18 months".  This gem is Alan Moore's law, posted years ago by some wag in response to an Intel article on geek.com.  This has, of course, surfaced because of the recent release of the Watchmen movie.  OK so I admit that I haven't read the book or even seen the movie - and based on my recent experiences of superhero movies (with the exception of the Hellboy movies, starring the very wonderful Ron Perlman) I may not bother. 

But when it comes to the "real" Moore's law - Gordon Moore, that is - I think we have all read the book, seen the movie and got the tattoo.  So I hereby pledge that I will never again begin another datasheet, article or white paper with words such as, "With design features getting smaller and smaller...".  With all respect to Dr. Moore, there are plenty of other interesting and less-explored angles on the manifold complexities of electronic design. 

Although we can't take Moore's law for granted, I think we can take it as read. 

Chris Clee

Earning calls sure are interesting! Below is an excerpt from the TSMC Q209 call (transcript from seekingalpha). The discussion revolves around the 40nm yield issues and TSMC's ramp to improving the yield. Dr. Liu really hits on a key element of DFM...(read more)

It was a sunny, Sunday afternoon in Anaheim (across from Disneyland). That combination of weather and entertainment didn't sway a group of 35 engineers from participating in the DFMC (Design for Manufacturability Coalition) Workshop at DAC 2010. On...(read more)

The test, which involves swabbing the inside of the nose, can produce results in minutes.

HHS will ship 14,400 vials of the drug to state health departments, putting the onus on them to decide which hospitals get some of the country's limited supply.

All three officials serve on the White House coronavirus task force.

Trying to revive a devastated U.S. economy, Trump is expanding his wartime metaphors to draw in just about everyone across the nation.

The prime minister will unveil a five-stage coronavirus warning system as part of a gradual easing of the lockdown.

Boris Johnson's address from No 10 is expected to set out a "roadmap" for easing lockdown restrictions.

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