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Tax rules for tech giants: EU’s divisive plan to tax Facebook, Amazon returns to spotlight

Spearheaded by France, the plan has met resistance from countries such as Ireland and Sweden, which question the wisdom of the EU going it alone given the global nature of digital services.




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Energy Conservation: Govt to star rate deep freezers and light commercial ACs

BEE will start rating deep freezers and light commercial air conditioners as well from now onwards. The star rating programme was launched on the 19th foundation ceremony of the BEE.




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Delhi weather update: Light rains predicted in national capital

The weatherman has predicted a cloudy afternoon with possibility of thunderstorm and gusty winds accompanied by light rains in parts of Delhi.




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Elon Musk’s SpaceX to send first manned flight to space! To dock at ISS in May

The tech entrepreneur's company will launch a Falcon 9 rocket to transport NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley in a first for the space agency as it looks to cut costs.




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Light rains likely in New Delhi

Light rain and thunderstorm accompanied with winds gusting up to 30-40 kilometres per hour are expected towards the evening under the influence of a western disturbance, it said.




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Boeing to redo test flight of uncrewed Starliner spaceship

A test run in December was ended early when the spacecraft failed to engage its thrusters on time.




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Elon Musk says SpaceX fixing brightness of Starlink project; here’s how satellites can ’emit bright light’

As part of its large-scale broadband internet connectivity project Starlink, the company has positioned many large satellites in the lower orbits of the Earth.




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Premier League does not yet have 'green light', minister warns

Britain's Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden warned Friday that the Premier League does not yet have the "green light" to resume but restated the government's hope that the season can be completed.




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Online platform spotlights underground Arab music

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




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Flights from Riyadh, Bahrain carrying stranded Indians reach Kerala

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




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Light Snow and 25 F at Saranac Lake, Adirondack Regional Airport, NY


Winds are from the Variable at 6.9 gusting to 27.6 MPH (6 gusting to 24 KT). The pressure is 1006.1 mb and the humidity is 72%. The wind chill is 17. Last Updated on May 9 2020, 11:51 am EDT.




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Light Snow and 35 F at Rochester, Greater Rochester International Airport, NY


Winds are West at 12.7 MPH (11 KT). The pressure is 1013.8 mb and the humidity is 67%. The wind chill is 26. Last Updated on May 9 2020, 11:54 am EDT.




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Economic Survey 2014-15 Highlights

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




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Indian Union Budget 2020 Highlights

Indian Budget 2020 Highlights - 10 Key Announcements




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~$CPIL$382066$title$textbox$Dogs bring 'a little light' into 'nightmare' of childhood cancer$/CPIL$~




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Light Snow and Breezy and 34 F at Buffalo, Greater Buffalo International Airport, NY

Winds are from the West at 20.7 gusting to 29.9 MPH (18 gusting to 26 KT). The pressure is 1014.8 mb and the humidity is 67%. The wind chill is 22. Last Updated on May 9 2020, 11:54 am EDT.




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Light Snow and 33 F at Watertown, Watertown International Airport, NY


Winds are from the West at 16.1 gusting to 20.7 MPH (14 gusting to 18 KT). The pressure is 1011.2 mb and the humidity is 75%. The wind chill is 22. Last Updated on May 9 2020, 11:56 am EDT.




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Light Snow and Breezy and 36 F at Syracuse, Syracuse Hancock International Airport, NY

Winds are from the West at 24.2 gusting to 34.5 MPH (21 gusting to 30 KT). The pressure is 1012.0 mb and the humidity is 50%. The wind chill is 24. Last Updated on May 9 2020, 11:54 am EDT.




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Light Snow and Breezy and 33 F at Niagara Falls, Niagara Falls International Airport, NY

Winds are from the West at 23.0 gusting to 31.1 MPH (20 gusting to 27 KT). The pressure is 1015.7 mb and the humidity is 70%. The wind chill is 21. Last Updated on May 9 2020, 11:53 am EDT.




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Light Snow and 29 F at Wellsville, Wellsville Municipal Airport, NY


Winds are from the West at 18.4 gusting to 26.5 MPH (16 gusting to 23 KT). The pressure is 1014.6 mb and the humidity is 69%. The wind chill is 17. Last Updated on May 9 2020, 11:56 am EDT.




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Siemens to acquire smart lighting control company Enlighted Inc. for an undisclosed sum

Siemens Building Technologies division announced it will acquire Enlighted Inc., a smart IoT building technology provider. The transaction is expected to close in Q3’18.

Enlighted Inc.’s core element is an advanced lighting control application. It is based on a patented, software-defined smart sensor that collects and monitors real-time occupancy, light levels, temperatures and energy usage.

The sensor can gauge temperature, light level, motion, energy, and has Bluetooth connectivity.

The Enlighted Micro Sensor

The Enlighted system works by collecting temperature, light and motion data via its smart sensors. A gateway device carries the information to Energy Manager, a secure browser-based interface to create profiles and adjust settings of the entire Enlighted Advanced Lighting Control System. The Energy manager operates as an analytics device.

The whole system consists of multi-function sensors, distributed computing, a network, and software applications run by Enlighted Inc.

“With Siemens as a global partner, we will both accelerate innovation and market adoption of our smart building technologies on an international scale.”Joe Costello, Chairman, and CEO of Enlighted Inc

Enlighted Inc.’s main target market is commercial real estate. Key use cases of its intelligent Lighting Control System are energy efficiency, controlling heating, ventilation and air conditioning, and building utilization reports.

Use the Postscapes 'Connected Products Framework' to understand the smart home and buildings eco-system.




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Light Snow and 31 F at Jamestown, Chautauqua County/Jamestown Airport, NY


Winds are from the West at 15.0 gusting to 25.3 MPH (13 gusting to 22 KT). The pressure is 1017.0 mb and the humidity is 76%. The wind chill is 20. Last Updated on May 9 2020, 11:56 am EDT.




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Light Snow and 34 F at Ithaca, Ithaca Tompkins Regional Airport, NY


Winds are from the Northwest at 16.1 gusting to 21.9 MPH (14 gusting to 19 KT). The pressure is 1012.7 mb and the humidity is 59%. The wind chill is 24. Last Updated on May 9 2020, 11:56 am EDT.




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Light Snow and 31 F at Fort Drum / Wheeler-Sack U. S. Army Airfield, NY


Winds are from the West at 15.0 gusting to 20.7 MPH (13 gusting to 18 KT). The pressure is 1010.3 mb and the humidity is 65%. The wind chill is 20. Last Updated on May 9 2020, 11:56 am EDT.




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EDA Retrospective: 30+ Years of Highlights and Lowlights, and What Comes Next

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

 




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Highlight shapes info

I could not find info about the highlight shapes/layers in the cadence doc directory, forum, support library.

I have a script that creates highlight shapes on the y* drawing layer.

My understand is the highlight is a virtual shape. The shapes go away when the cadence session is closed or when you close data of that cellview if it is not global.

If they are vitual shapes it would be okay to use valid or process layers when I create the highlight set with geCreateHilightSet.

Ex: ( The command I use to create the hiighlight set       geCreateHilightSet(cv list(lay purp) nil) )

Current y0-9 drawing 

To N-P_implant drawing

Paul





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Scripting Bugs Blight Security Giants' Websites





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Dassault Systèmes and SATS Create World’s First Virtual Kitchen for In-Flight Catering Production

•Dassault Systèmes collaborated with SATS, Asia’s leading food solutions and gateway services provider, to boost operational efficiency, minimize food waste •Growth in airline passenger travel underscores need for sustainable excellence in aerospace industry-related commercial services •Digital twin experience with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform bridges the gap between the virtual and real for in-flight catering production




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IBM Threat Report Highlights Data Risks




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Google Data Shines Light On Whether Coronavirus Lockdowns Worldwide Are Working




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Lights That Warn Planes Of Obstacles Were Exposed To Open Internet





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Packet Storm Exploit 2013-1022-1 - Microsoft Silverlight Invalid Typecast / Memory Disclosure

This exploit leverages both invalid typecast and memory disclosure vulnerabilities in Microsoft Silverlight 5 in order to achieve code execution. This exploit code demonstrates remote code execution by popping calc.exe. It was obtained through the Packet Storm Bug Bounty program. Google flags this as malware so only use this if you know what you are doing. The password to unarchive this zip is the word "infected".




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Packet Storm Advisory 2013-1022-1 - Microsoft Silverlight Invalid Typecast / Memory Disclosure

Microsoft Silverlight 5 suffers from invalid typecast and memory disclosure vulnerabilities that, when leveraged together, allow for arbitrary code execution. A memory disclosure vulnerability exists in the public WriteableBitmap class from System.Windows.dll. This class allows reading of image pixels from the user-defined data stream via the public SetSource() method. BitmapSource.ReadStream() allocates and returns byte array and a count of array items as out parameters. These returned values are taken from the input stream and they can be fully controlled by the untrusted code. When returned "count" is greater than "array.Length", then data outside the "array" are used as input stream data by the native BitmapSource_SetSource() from agcore.dll. Later all data can be viewed via the public WriteableBitmap.Pixels[] property. Exploitation details related to these findings were purchased through the Packet Storm Bug Bounty program.





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Random Number Bug Blights FreeBSD






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Latvia highlights anti-money laundering efforts

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.




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Finance minister seeks to keep Serbia in FDI spotlight

Serbia’s minister of finance, Siniša Mali, explains why the country is one of Europe's economic stars, and how its FDI levels have risen on the back of this.




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Spotlight: Serbian free zones

Serbia’s 15 free zones are driving forward an ongoing flurry of foreign investment in the country’s buoyant manufacturing scene, especially in automotives.




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ComEd installs off-grid renewable lighting at Bronzeville schools

This week ComEd said that it’s furthering innovation in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood with the installation of renewable energy powered lights along the walkway to the Beethoven Elementary School. Bronzeville is home to the first “microgrid cluster” in the United States.





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Event Focus: SolarVision highlights Asia renewables potential

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




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Bermuda Electric Light Company installs 10-MW/5.5-MWh energy storage system

Yesterday, energy storage company Saft said it delivered and installed a turnkey Energy Storage System to Bermuda Electric Light Company (BELCO). The system provides up to 10 MW power for spinning reserves and frequency response to maintain grid stability and has a storage capacity of 5.5MWh, said the company. The official ribbon-cutting ceremony was held on May 16.





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Bermuda Electric Light Company installs 10-MW/5.5-MWh energy storage system

Yesterday, energy storage company Saft said it delivered and installed a turnkey Energy Storage System to Bermuda Electric Light Company (BELCO). The system provides up to 10 MW power for spinning reserves and frequency response to maintain grid stability and has a storage capacity of 5.5MWh, said the company. The official ribbon-cutting ceremony was held on May 16.




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French drone startup takes flight in Australia

Sunbirds, a Toulouse-based startup has set up an office, assembly workshop and maintenance centre in Brisbane, Queensland. The office provides drone packages and drone-as-a-service solutions to surveyors, cattle stations and environmental monitoring companies. Australia is emerging as a hub for Agriculture 4.0 – the next generation of technologies set to revolutionise the agriculture and food sectors.