COVID-19: While the tourism sector is dealing with unprecedented disruptions, the closure of borders and more restrictions will just worsen the blow.

More than 16,000 passenger jets are grounded worldwide, according to industry researcher Cirium, as the coronavirus obliterates travel and puts unprecedented strain on airline finances.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation has directed al airlines to refrain from booking tickets as no decision has been taken to commence the operation of domestic, international flights from May 4, 2020.

Lockdown in India has brought some positive environmental news from clean rivers to clean air at many places. Pollution has declined drastically and as a result, people are able to see distant things.

US Elections 2016: The US Embassy in Delhi is all set to welcome the new President. Here are some pics what the US embassy in Delhi looks like right now:

Uber doing away with the post-trip tracking feature that had drawn the ire of users is a sign of the torsion privacy concerns create when faced with the demands of a data-driven world.

1)for a lawyer , typing and short hand is required or not?

As the date of launch nears, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in a tweet has revealed what it’s geo Imaging Satellite, GISAT-1 can do

my relative put some cloth &grocery item &exit from mall.salesman &other caught him &cut the plastic strip zip tie on his bag (which malls worker had put on his bag before entrance . zip tie was cut with cutter . & they saw items &call 100 no. police came &took accused in police Thana &manager gave CCTV footage &bag with articles to police & filed FIR & accused got jail & bail my uncle met io (investigation officer) for help he said meet complainant . i can delay to file charge sheet. &then lokdown is started. & now 17 may (the date of lokdown will stop) is coming soon. charge sheet date is 21 may what i can suggest my uncle to be approach to io &complainant as uncle is farmer & illiterate he don't know what to be make in our favor to become accused acquittal. i am helping him. could you please 1.can a final report or closure report or any other report may be done to be acquittal. don't know what is in our favor. 2.can we approach io to remove tag(in which company name &price is written ) from cloth (the bag with articles is in police custody )so it would not proved that cloth belongs to this company &may be they already present in his bag before entering into mall. 3. is it feasible 4.or can we pray complainant to fabricate his statement in our favor when io will record this in 161 crpc may be . 5.what should we try to that leads accused acquittal. i am student .i dont know I pray our counsel he don't want to see us & don't want to hear us . this does not sounds good. pardon me if this thing is not discuss here.

Former Attorney General Advocate Mukul Rohatgi has contributed his share towards helping the Delhi government to enable the conducting of Coronavirus tests at a faster pace.Mr. Rohatgi contacted Shri Satyendar Jain, Minister of Health, Delhi to findo

What has happened?In the late evening hours of Saturday, purported screenshots of chats between boys and girls in a group called the “Bois Locker Room” started making rounds on social media. By early morning of Sunday, the screenshots had

During this coronavirus pandemic, there are many COVID-related graphs and curves in the news and on social media. The public, politicians, and pundits scrutinize each day's graphs to determine which communities are winning the fight against coronavirus. Interspersed among these many graphs is the oft-repeated mantra, "Flatten the curve!" As [...]

The post What does 'flatten the curve' mean? To which curve does it apply? appeared first on The DO Loop.

The COVID-19 pandemic has mercilessly exposed the weaknesses of institutions upon which the overwhelming majority of the world’s people rely.

The operator of a paper mill in Raigarh in Chhattisgarh, where a gas leak on May 6 evening led to the hospitalisation of seven people, was arrested on Friday for criminal conspiracy and attempt to...

Assam has 'temporarily' shut down the Guwahati Medical College and Hospital (GMCH) - the biggest medical college of the northeast and the B Borooah Cancer Institute in Guwahati after four coronavirus...

A 27-year-old woman suffered serious burn injuries after she was set on fire by three men when she resisted their molestation bid in Chhattisgarh's Korba district, the police said on Friday.

Many courses designed by Ivy League universities are available free of cost on various e-learning platforms.

After privacy concerns and a government advisory against popular video conferencing app Zoom, everyone is looking for alternatives.

The real gains are for the gaming industry, which stands to benefit from this innovation.

Getting big-ticket investments would be challenging; focus on investments that are modest in size and low in resource demands.

A timely book that explains the pandemic to children, helping satisfy their curiosity about it.

“Ever since the outbreak, we have observed increased volumes of phishing attacks as well as a number of malicious websites purporting to offer information or advice about the pandemic,” says Venugopal N, director, software engineering, Check Point Software Technologies.

A fully Keynesian approach will need to be taken by the government. People are losing jobs and production activity has come to a standstill due to the lockdown.

Building the infrastructure for a low carbon future will require oil. While a long term decline for oil’s central place in energy use seems inevitable, we need to ensure that our oil sector continues to contribute to the national economy

Domestic benchmark indices were in for a bumpy ride this week with many ups and down along the way. Starting the week equity markets tanked and lost 80% of the gains made in the previous week as investors lost Rs 5.8 lakh crore.

From wounding up six debt mutual fund schemes with an AUM of over Rs 30,000 crore, to dealing with the ire of investors, the fund house has been busy fire-fighting ever since the nationwide lockdown was announced.

Former Chhattisgarh chief minister Ajit Jogi, 74, was admitted in a private hospital here on Saturday after he suffered a cardiac arrest, doctors said, adding that his condition is critical.

In part 1 of this 3-part blog series, we’ll delve into phishing and take a look at how you can protect yourself by deploying a strategy of threat protection for your company.

In part 1 of this 3-part blog series, we’ll delve into Cyber Incident Response Planning and how to address and manage the repercussions of a cyberattack or incident.

1. Alia Bhatt proves she was always ready to face the camera as she poses with mom Soni Razdan in a throwback pic  PINKVILLA
2. When 8-year-old Alia Bhatt joined parents Soni Razdan and Mahesh Bhatt on reality show, said ‘actress...  Hindustan Times
3. Mother’s Day 2020: From Alia Bhatt-Soni Razdan to Kajol-Tanuja, a look at the candid clicks of these moth  Times of India
4. Streaming Guide: Alia Bhatt films  The Indian Express
5. Student Of The Year star Alia Bhatt has wanted to be an actress since the young age of 8, Did you know?  PINKVILLA
6. View Full coverage on Google News

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CSR In India 2019 is contributed by SUBAH, an enabler of CSR in India

[Daily Maverick] In the context of a strained fiscus and a dysfunctional social security agency - freeing up private assets that are owed to poor and vulnerable individuals could also go a long way to supporting the increase in social welfare grants. It is in this context that the roughly R43-billion owed to just under 5 million people, many of them grant beneficiaries, should be viewed.

All you need to know about F1's plans to start the season with behind-closed-doors races in Europe this July, including numbers required and what another positive Covid-19 test would do to the hopes of completing a full championship year.

Alexander Albon won a virtual Formula One thriller around Brazil's Interlagos circuit on Sunday to deny Charles Leclerc an esports hat-trick.

In fact, they're the worst of the worst.

The 2020 UCLA Bruins might have been on pace for NCAA softball history, but they're not the only powerhouse team not to win a WCWS title.

Matthew Berry gives players the Love/Hate treatment coming out of the 2020 NFL draft, identifying those who have gained or lost the most fantasy football value.

The Redskins quarterback's broken leg led to an insidious infection that could have cost him his life.

This is the 20th installment of The Rationalist, my column for the Times of India.

Amit Shah’s induction into the union cabinet is such an interesting moment. Even partisans who oppose the BJP, as I do, would admit that Shah is a political genius. Under his leadership, the BJP has become an electoral behemoth in the most complicated political landscape in the world. The big question that now arises is this: can Shah do for India what he did for the BJP?

This raises a perplexing question: in the last five years, as the BJP has flourished, India has languished. And yet, the leadership of both the party and the nation are more or less the same. Then why hasn’t the ability to manage the party translated to governing the country?

I would argue that there are two reasons for this. One, the skills required in those two tasks are different. Two, so are the incentives in play.

Let’s look at the skills first. Managing a party like the BJP is, in some ways, like managing a large multinational company. Shah is a master at top-down planning and micro-management. How he went about winning the 2014 elections, described in detail in Prashant Jha’s book How the BJP Wins, should be a Harvard Business School case study. The book describes how he fixed the BJP’s ground game in Uttar Pradesh, picking teams for 147,000 booths in Uttar Pradesh, monitoring them, and keeping them accountable.

Shah looked at the market segmentation in UP, and hit upon his now famous “60% formula”. He realised he could not deliver the votes of Muslims, Yadavs and Jatavs, who were 40% of the population. So he focussed on wooing the other 60%, including non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits. He carried out versions of these caste reconfigurations across states, and according to Jha, covered “over 5 lakh kilometres” between 2014 and 2017, consolidating market share in every state in this country. He nurtured “a pool of a thousand new OBC and Dalit leaders”, going well beyond the posturing of other parties.

That so many Dalits and OBCs voted for the BJP in 2019 is astonishing. Shah went past Mandal politics, managing to subsume previously antagonistic castes and sub-castes into a broad Hindutva identity. And as the BJP increased its depth, it expanded its breadth as well. What it has done in West Bengal, wiping out the Left and weakening Mamata Banerjee, is jaw-dropping. With hindsight, it may one day seem inevitable, but only a madman could have conceived it, and only a genius could have executed it.

Good man to be Home Minister then, eh? Not quite. A country is not like a large company or even a political party. It is much too complex to be managed from the top down, and a control freak is bound to flounder. The approach needed is very different.

Some tasks of governance, it is true, are tailor-made for efficient managers. Building infrastructure, taking care of roads and power, building toilets (even without an underlying drainage system) and PR campaigns can all be executed by good managers. But the deeper tasks of making an economy flourish require a different approach. They need a light touch, not a heavy hand.

The 20th century is full of cautionary tales that show that economies cannot be centrally planned from the top down. Examples of that ‘fatal conceit’, to use my hero Friedrich Hayek’s term, include the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and even the lady Modi most reminds me of, Indira Gandhi.

The task of the state, when it comes to the economy, is to administer a strong rule of law, and to make sure it is applied equally. No special favours to cronies or special interest groups. Just unleash the natural creativity of the people, and don’t try to micro-manage.

Sadly, the BJP’s impulse, like that of most governments of the past, is a statist one. India should have a small state that does a few things well. Instead, we have a large state that does many things badly, and acts as a parasite on its people.

As it happens, the few things that we should do well are all right up Shah’s managerial alley. For example, the rule of law is effectively absent in India today, especially for the poor. As Home Minister, Shah could fix this if he applied the same zeal to governing India as he did to growing the BJP. But will he?

And here we come to the question of incentives. What drives Amit Shah: maximising power, or serving the nation? What is good for the country will often coincide with what is good for the party – but not always. When they diverge, which path will Shah choose? So much rests on that.

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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

Are they basically the same thing? I am trying to get as much experience with Allegro since a lot of jobs I am looking at right now are asking for Cadence Allegro experience (I wish they asked for Altium experience...). I currently have access to PCB Editor, but I don't want to commit to learning Editor if Allegro is completely different. Also walmart one, are the Cadence Allegro courses worth it? I won't be paying for it and if it's worth it, I figure I might as well use the opportunity to say I know how to use two complex CAD tools.

The Triple Beat analysis is similar to Rapid IP2/IP3 analysis except that it uses three tones instead of two. It is used in cases where two closely-spaced small-signal inputs from a transmitter leak in to the receiver along with an intended small-signal RF input signal. (read more)

CDNLive is a user conference, and verification is one of the largest categories of content with multiple tracks covering multiple days. Portable stimulus is one of the hottest new areas in verification, and continues to be popular in all venues. At l...(read more)

Recently, I read an article about how failure is the stepping stone to success in life. It instantly struck a chord and a thought came zinging from nowhere about what happens to the failed arcs of a...

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