1 Dominican Peso = 0.1785 Moroccan Dirham

1 Dominican Peso = 0.011 Latvian Lat

1 Dominican Peso = 0.0536 Lithuanian Lita

1 Dominican Peso = 3.3887 Sri Lanka Rupee

1 Dominican Peso = 27.4845 Lebanese Pound

1 Dominican Peso = 7.6669 Kazakhstan Tenge

1 Dominican Peso = 0.0151 Cayman Islands Dollar

1 Dominican Peso = 0.0056 Kuwaiti Dinar

1 Dominican Peso = 22.1619 South Korean Won

1 Dominican Peso = 1.9268 Kenyan Shilling

1 Dominican Peso = 1.9381 Japanese Yen

1 Dominican Peso = 0.0129 Jordanian Dinar

1 Dominican Peso = 2.657 Icelandic Krona

1 Dominican Peso = 1.3718 Indian Rupee

1 Dominican Peso = 0.0637 Israeli New Sheqel

1 Dominican Peso = 268.4101 Indonesian Rupiah

1 Dominican Peso = 5.871 Hungarian Forint

1 Dominican Peso = 0.1261 Croatian Kuna

1 Dominican Peso = 0.4548 Honduran Lempira

1 Dominican Peso = 0.1411 Hong Kong Dollar

1 Dominican Peso = 0.0146 British Pound Sterling

1 Dominican Peso = 0.0409 Fiji Dollar

1 Dominican Peso = 0.0166 Euro

1 Dominican Peso = 0.2828 Egyptian Pound

1 Dominican Peso = 0.2591 Estonian Kroon

1 Dominican Peso = 2.3317 Algerian Dinar

1 Dominican Peso = 0.125 Danish Krone

1 Dominican Peso = 0.4566 Czech Republic Koruna

1 Dominican Peso = 10.3367 Costa Rican Colon

1 Dominican Peso = 70.7935 Colombian Peso

1 Dominican Peso = 0.1285 Chinese Yuan Renminbi

1 Dominican Peso = 15.0036 Chilean Peso

1 Dominican Peso = 0.0176 Swiss Franc

1 Dominican Peso = 0.0255 Canadian Dollar

1 Dominican Peso = 0.2206 Botswana Pula

1 Dominican Peso = 0.1041 Brazilian Real

1 Dominican Peso = 0.1253 Bolivian Boliviano

1 Dominican Peso = 0.0257 Brunei Dollar

1 Dominican Peso = 0.0069 Bahraini Dinar

1 Dominican Peso = 0.0328 Bulgarian Lev

1 Dominican Peso = 1.5442 Bangladeshi Taka

1 Dominican Peso = 0.0278 Australian Dollar

1 Dominican Peso = 1.2077 Argentine Peso

1 Dominican Peso = 0.0326 Netherlands Antillean Guilder

1 Dominican Peso = 0.0667 United Arab Emirates Dirham

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 16.045 Dominican Peso

1 Brunei Dollar = 38.9457 Dominican Peso

This is the 15th installment of The Rationalist, my column for the Times of India.

It’s election season, and promises are raining down on voters like rose petals on naïve newlyweds. Earlier this week, the Congress party announced a minimum income guarantee for the poor. This Friday, the Modi government released a budget full of sops. As the days go by, the promises will get bolder, and you might feel important that so much attention is being given to you. Well, the joke is on you.

Every election, HL Mencken once said, is “an advance auction sale of stolen goods.” A bunch of competing mafias fight to rule over you for the next five years. You decide who wins, on the basis of who can bribe you better with your own money. This is an absurd situation, which I tried to express in a limerick I wrote for this page a couple of years ago:

POLITICS: A neta who loves currency notes/ Told me what his line of work denotes./ ‘It is kind of funny./ We steal people’s money/And use some of it to buy their votes.’

We’re the dupes here, and we pay far more to keep this circus going than this circus costs. It would be okay if the parties, once they came to power, provided good governance. But voters have given up on that, and now only want patronage and handouts. That leads to one of the biggest problems in Indian politics: We are stuck in an equilibrium where all good politics is bad economics, and vice versa.

For example, the minimum guarantee for the poor is good politics, because the optics are great. It’s basically Garibi Hatao: that slogan made Indira Gandhi a political juggernaut in the 1970s, at the same time that she unleashed a series of economic policies that kept millions of people in garibi for decades longer than they should have been.

This time, the Congress has released no details, and keeping it vague makes sense because I find it hard to see how it can make economic sense. Depending on how they define ‘poor’, how much income they offer and what the cost is, the plan will either be ineffective or unworkable.

The Modi government’s interim budget announced a handout for poor farmers that seemed rather pointless. Given our agricultural distress, offering a poor farmer 500 bucks a month seems almost like mockery.

Such condescending handouts solve nothing. The poor want jobs and opportunities. Those come with growth, which requires structural reforms. Structural reforms don’t sound sexy as election promises. Handouts do.

A classic example is farm loan waivers. We have reached a stage in our politics where every party has to promise them to assuage farmers, who are a strong vote bank everywhere. You can’t blame farmers for wanting them – they are a necessary anaesthetic. But no government has yet made a serious attempt at tackling the root causes of our agricultural crisis.

Why is it that Good Politics in India is always Bad Economics? Let me put forth some possible reasons. One, voters tend to think in zero-sum ways, as if the pie is fixed, and the only way to bring people out of poverty is to redistribute. The truth is that trade is a positive-sum game, and nations can only be lifted out of poverty when the whole pie grows. But this is unintuitive.

Two, Indian politics revolves around identity and patronage. The spoils of power are limited – that is indeed a zero-sum game – so you’re likely to vote for whoever can look after the interests of your in-group rather than care about the economy as a whole.

Three, voters tend to stay uninformed for good reasons, because of what Public Choice economists call Rational Ignorance. A single vote is unlikely to make a difference in an election, so why put in the effort to understand the nuances of economics and governance? Just ask, what is in it for me, and go with whatever seems to be the best answer.

Four, Politicians have a short-term horizon, geared towards winning the next election. A good policy that may take years to play out is unattractive. A policy that will win them votes in the short term is preferable.

Sadly, no Indian party has shown a willingness to aim for the long term. The Congress has produced new Gandhis, but not new ideas. And while the BJP did make some solid promises in 2014, they did not walk that talk, and have proved to be, as Arun Shourie once called them, UPA + Cow. Even the Congress is adopting the cow, in fact, so maybe the BJP will add Temple to that mix?

Benjamin Franklin once said, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.” This election season, my friends, the people of India are on the menu. You have been deveined and deboned, marinated with rhetoric, seasoned with narrative – now enter the oven and vote.

© 2007 IndiaUncut.com. All rights reserved.
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EDA investor and former executive Jim Hogan is optimistic about automotive electronics, but he has some concerns as well. At the recent Design Automation Conference (DAC 2015), he delivered a speech titled “The Looming Quality, Reliability, and Safety Crisis in Automotive Electronics...Why is it and what can we do to avoid it?"

Hogan gave the keynote speech for IP Talks!, a series of over 30 half-hour presentations located at the ChipEstimate.com booth. Presenters included ARM, Cadence, eSilicon, Kilopass, Sidense, SilabTech, Sonics, Synopsys, True Circuits, and TSMC. Held in an informal setting, the talks addressed the challenges faced by SoC design teams and showed how the latest developments in semiconductor IP can contribute to design success.

Jim Hogan delivers keynote speech at DAC 2015 IP Talks!

Hogan talked about several phases of automotive electronics. These include assisted driving to avoid collisions, controlled automation of isolated tasks such as parallel parking, and, finally, fully autonomous vehicles, which Hogan expects to see in 15 to 20 years. The top immediate priorities for automotive electronics designers, he said, will be government regulation, fuel economy, advanced safety, and infotainment.

More Code than a Boeing 777

According to Hogan, today’s automobiles use 50-100 microcontrollers per car, resulting in a worldwide automotive semiconductor market of around $40 billion. The global market for advanced automotive electronics is expected to reach $240 billion by 2020. Software is growing faster in the automotive market than it is in smartphones. Hogan quoted a Ford vice president who observed that there are more lines of code in a Ford Fusion car than a Boeing 777 airplane.

One unique challenge for automotive electronics designers is long-term reliability. This is because a typical U.S. car stays on the road for 15 years, Hogan said. Americans are holding onto new vehicles for a record 71.4 months.

Another challenge is regulatory compliance. Aeronautics is highly regulated from manufacturing to air traffic control, and the same will probably be true of automated cars. Hogan speculated that the Department of Transportation will be the regulatory authority for autonomous cars. Today, automotive electronics providers must comply with the ISO26262 automotive functional safety specification.

So where do we go from here? “We’ve got to change our mindset,” Hogan said. “We’ve got to focus on safety and reliability and demand a different kind of engineering discipline.” You can watch Hogan’s entire presentation by clicking on the video icon below, or clicking here. You can also watch other IP Talks! videos from DAC 2015 here.

https://youtu.be/qL4kAEu-PNw

Richard Goering

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DAC 2015: See the Latest in Semiconductor IP at “IP Talks!”

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Dear all,

I am using Conformal Constraint Designer (Version 17.1) to analyse a SystemVerilog based design.

While performing default HDL checks it finds  some violations (issues) in RTL and complains (warnings, etc) about RTL checks and others.

My questions:

Is there any directive which I can add to RTL (system Verilog) so that particular line of code or signal is ignored or not checked for HDL or RTL checks.

I can set ignore rules in rule manager (gui) but it does not seems effective if code line number changes or new signals are introduced.

What is the best way to customize default_hdl_rules ?

I will be grateful for your guidance.

Thanks for your time.