More photographs from the 2018 Delaware State Fair are available on Flickr. DOVER, Del. — Many Delaware youth and adult exhibitors are ready to showcase their agricultural exhibits at this year’s Delaware State Fair. Along with rides, food, and games, the state fair is a great opportunity for fair-goers to learn more about agriculture – […]

The theme for the 50th anniversary of Earth Week is climate change, an issue that concerns most Delawareans, according to a report by DNREC.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Media Contacts: Cynthia Cavett, Marketing Specialist & Public Information Officer Delaware Office of Highway Safety Cynthia.Cavett@delaware.gov 302-744-2743 DOVER, Del. (September 15, 2019) – Child Passenger Safety Week is a vital awareness campaign that runs nationwide to promote kids being secured in the right car seat for their age, height, and weight. This […]

Prime Minister Narendra Modi also asked state governments to ensure that rules and regulations of the coronavirus lockdown are enforced as he noted that many people are not taking the measure seriously.

The number Covid-19 cases are rising by the, both globally and in India. Students are particularly facing the brunt of uncertainty arising from the partial lockdowns.

The airline has already cancelled flights between Bangalore-Kuala Lumpur until March 31, 2020 and Delhi-Kuala Lumpur until April 30, 2020.

Most of the states and Union territories also imposed fresh restrictions on public transport and gatherings. In Delhi, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal announced the closure of restaurants, but takeaway outlets will remain open.

However, the FICCI report indicates that cruise bookings for countries like Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia have registered considerable cancellations already.

GoAir helpline, cancellation, flight status: Go Air has cancelled all flights from Delhi Airport (DEL), Mumbai Airport (BOM), and Bengaluru Airport (BLR) with flight numbers like G8 33, G8 34, G8 43, G8 44, G8 23, and G8 24 have been cancelled until April 15, 2020.

COVID-19: Earlier this month, after a significant spike in coronavirus cases across the globe, especially Europe, India had suspended all international in-bound passenger flights.

Spicejet flight cancellation: Flyers must remember that this is a limited period waiver. SpiceJet has categorically stated that it reserves the right to withdraw this waiver without prior notice.

For Vistara CV members, tier status re-evaluation is paused from March 18 to April 30. However, if Vistara CV members wish to reschedule their travel to a later date, Vistara is providing an offer We offer to opt for an alternate date without any change free.

Currently, most of the airlines are not giving waivers on the cancellation charges and also not refunding in cash.

All the scheduled domestic and international flights have been cancelled till May 3, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the extension of the nationwide lockdown till 3rd of May.

A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the extension of nationwide lockdown till May 3, 2020, the Ministry of Home Affairs has released guidelines for the lockdown.

Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri tweeted that the Ministry of Civil Aviation is yet to decide on opening domestic or international operations

Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri took to Twitter to indicate that the restrictions will only be lifted once the government is confident that the outbreak of Coronavirus has been controlled.

Flyers, who had booked flights via Paytm, will receive the refund in their airline credit shell. They can redeem that refund amount in order to book a flight ticket via Paytm website and mobile site.

Suspension of flight operations has been extended till May 17, the Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) said in a circular issued today.

India will send flights to several countries between May 7 and 13. Among the countries, India is likely to send 10 flights to the UAE, seven flights each to the US, and the UK. Apart from these, India will send five to Saudi Arabia, five to Singapore, and two flights to Qatar

The operation of two flights from Qatar to Kerala is a part of Modi's government's mega mission to evacuate close to 15,000 Indians stranded in 12 countries between May 7 and May 13.

Good work team!' is how External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar termed India's biggest evacuation exercise on Thursday.

Cube Sessions offers performances and interviews with prominent underground artists, all staged from within a cube-shaped, neon-lit metal scaffold. Artists include soloists Zeid Hamdan and Lynn Adib as well as bands Adonis and Tanjaret Daghet

The passengers were subjected to thermal test at the aerobridge itself before allowing them to undergo customs and immigration checks, Kozhikode airport sources said.

Economic Survey 2014-15 projects growth rate up to 8.5%

Indian Budget 2020 Highlights - 10 Key Announcements

In 1985, as a relatively new editor at Computer Design magazine, I was asked to go forth and cover a new business called CAE (computer-aided engineering). I knew nothing about it, but I had been writing about design for test, so there seemed to be somewhat of a connection. Little did I know that “CAE” would turn into “EDA” and that I’d write about it for the next 30 years, for Computer Design, EE Times, Cadence, and a few others.

Now that I’m about to retire, I’m looking back over those 30 years. What a ride it has been! By the numbers I covered 31 Design Automation Conferences (DACs), hundreds of new products, dozens of acquisitions and startups, dozens of lawsuits, and some blind alleys that didn’t work out (like “silicon compilation”). Chip design went from gate arrays and PLDs with a few thousand gates to processors and SoCs with billions of transistors.

In 1985 there were three big CAE vendors – Daisy Systems, Mentor Graphics, and Valid Logic. All sold bundled packages that included workstations and CAE software; in fact, Daisy and Valid designed and manufactured their own workstations. In the early 1980s a workstation with schematic capture and gate-level logic simulation might have set you back $120,000. In 1985 OrCAD, now part of Cadence, came out with a $500 schematic capture package running on IBM PCs.

Cadence and Synopsys emerged in the late 1980s, and by the 1990s the EDA industry was pretty much a software-only business (apart from specialized machines like simulation accelerators). Since the early 1990s the “big three” EDA vendors have been Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor, giving the industry stability but allowing for competition and innovation.

Here, in my view, are some of the highlights that occurred during the past 30 years of EDA.

EDA is a Highlight

The biggest highlight in EDA is the existence of a commercial EDA industry! Marching hand in hand with the fabless semiconductor revolution, commercial EDA made it possible for hundreds of companies to design semiconductors, as opposed to a small handful that could afford large internal CAD operations and fabs. With hundreds of semiconductor companies as opposed to a half-dozen, there’s a lot more creativity, and you get the level of sophistication and intelligence that you see in your smartphone, video camera, tablet, gaming console, and car today.

CAE + CAD = EDA. This is not just a terminology issue. By the mid-1980s it became clear that front-end design (CAE) and physical design (CAD) belonged together. The big CAE vendors got involved in IC and PCB CAD, and presented increasingly integrated solutions. People got tired of writing “CAE/CAD” and “EDA” was born.

The move from gate-level design to RTL. This move happened around 1990, and in my view this is EDA’s primary technology success story during the past 30 years. Moving up in abstraction made the design and verification of much larger chips possible. Going from gate-level schematics to a hardware description language (HDL) revolutionized logic design and verification. Which would you rather do – draw all the gates that form an adder, or write a few lines of code and let a synthesis tool find an adder in your chosen technology?

Two developments made this shift in design possible. One was the emergence of commercial RTL synthesis (or “logic synthesis”) tools from Synopsys and other companies, which happened around 1990. Another was the availability of Verilog, developed by Gateway Design Automation and purchased by Cadence in 1989, as a standard RTL HDL. Although most EDA vendors at the time were pushing VHDL, designers wanted Verilog and that’s what most still use (with SystemVerilog coming on strong in the verification space).

IC functional verification underwent huge changes in the late 1990s and early 2000s, largely due to new technology developed by Verisity, which was acquired by Cadence in 2005. Before Verisity, verification engineers were writing and running directed tests in an ad-hoc manner. Verisity introduced or improved technologies such as pseudo-random test generation, coverage metrics, reusable verification IP, and semi-automated verification planning. The Verisity “e” language became a widely used hardware verification language (HVL).

The biggest way that EDA has expanded its focus has been through semiconductor IP. Today Synopsys and Cadence are leading providers in this area. Thanks to the availability of design and verification IP, many SoC designs today reuse as much as 80% of previous content. This makes it much, much faster to design the remaining portion. While IP began with fairly simple elements, today commercially available IP can include whole subsystems along with the software that runs on them. With IP, EDA vendors are providing not only design tools but design content.

Finally, the EDA industry has done an amazing job of keeping up with SoC complexity and with advanced process nodes. Thanks to intense and early collaboration between foundries, IP, and EDA providers, tools and IP have been ready for process nodes going down to 10nm.

Where Does ESL Fit?

In some ways, electronic system level (ESL) design is both a lowlight and a highlight. It’s a lowlight because people have been talking about it for 30 years and the acceptance and adoption have come very slowly. ESL is a highlight because it’s finally starting to happen, and its impact on design and verification flows could be dramatic. Still, ESL is vaguely defined and can be used to describe almost anything that happens at a higher abstraction level than RTL.

High-level synthesis (HLS) is an ESL technology that is seeing increasing use in production environments. Current HLS tools are not restricted to datapaths, and they produce RTL code that gives better quality of results than hand-written RTL. Another ESL methodology that’s catching on is virtual prototyping, which lets software developers write software pre-silicon using SystemC models. Both HLS and virtual prototyping are made possible by the standardization of SystemC and transaction-level modeling (TLM). However, it’s still not easy to use the same SystemC code for HLS and virtual prototyping.

And Now, Some Lowlights

Every new industry has some twists and turns, and EDA is no exception. For example, the EDA industry in the 1980s and 1990s sparked a lot of lawsuits. At EE Times my colleagues and I wrote a number of articles about EDA legal disputes, mostly about intellectual property, trade secrets, or patent issues. Over the past decade, fortunately, there have been far fewer EDA lawsuits than we had before the turn of the century.

Another issue that was troublesome in the 1980s and 1990s was so-called “standards wars.” These would occur as EDA vendors picked one side or the other in a standards dispute. For example, power intent formats were a point of conflict in the early 2000s, but the Common Power Format (CPF) and the Unified Power Format (UPF) are on the road to convergence today with the IEEE 1801 effort. As mentioned previously, Verilog and VHDL were competing for adoption in the early 1990s. For the most part, Verilog won, showing that the designer community makes the final decision about which standards will be used.

How on earth did there get to be something like 30 DFM (design for manufacturability) companies 10-12 years ago? To my knowledge, none of these companies are around today. A few were acquired, but most simply faded away. A lot of investors lost money. Today, VCs and angel investors are funding very few EDA or IP startups. There are fewer EDA startups than there used to be, and that’s too bad, because that’s where a lot of the innovation comes from.

Here’s another current lowlight -- not enough bright engineering or computer science students are joining EDA companies. They’re going to Google, Apple, Facebook, and the like. EDA is perceived as a mature industry that is still technically very difficult. We need to bring some excitement back into EDA.

Where Is EDA Headed?

Now we come to what you might call “headlights” and look at what’s coming. My list includes:

• System Design Enablement. This term has been coined by Cadence to describe a focus on whole systems or end products including chips, packages, boards, embedded software, and mechanical components. There are far more systems companies than semiconductor companies, leaving a large untapped market that’s looking for solutions.
• New frontiers for EDA. At a 2015 Design Automation Conference speech, analyst Gary Smith suggested that EDA can move into markets such as embedded software, mechanical CAD, biomedical, optics, and more.
• Vertical markets. EDA has until now been “horizontal,” providing the same solution for all market segments. Going forward, markets like consumer, automotive, and industrial will have differing needs and will need optimized tools and IP.
• Internet of Things. This is a current buzzword, but the impact on EDA remains uncertain. Many IoT devices will be heavily analog, use mature process nodes, and be dirt cheap. Lip-Bu Tan, Cadence CEO, recently pointed out that the silicon percentage of IoT revenue will be small and that a lot of the profits will be on the service side.

Moving On

For the past six years I’ve been writing the Industry Insights blog at Cadence.com. All things change, and with this post comes a farewell – I am retiring in late June and will be pursuing a variety of interests other than EDA. I’ll be watching, though, to see what happens next in this small but vital industry. Thanks for reading!

Richard Goering

FDI into Latvia has recovered in recent years as the Baltic state has implemented stricter anti-money laundering procedures. Latvian minister of economics Ralfs Nemiro talks to Alex Irwin-Hunt about the progress made.

Southeast Asia is poised for a long-overdue and much-needed boom in solar.

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After suspending its passenger flights due to pandemic flight restrictions, Turkey's low-cost carrier Pegasus Airlines announced on May 7 it has started cargo flights.

MANILA: Manila’s international airport will allow international charter and commercial flights to resume arriving on designated days, beginning from Monday.

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Bank-held nonperforming loans in some Asian economies have risen in recent years. Policy makers should address this growing risk now.