Editorial

Changing the look of ISD The new design reconfirms our commitment to delivering valuable technical information clearly and in a readily accessible format. by Jonah McLeod

No doubt you'll have already noticed that this issue of Integrated System Design has a new look to it. We sincerely hope you like it.

We felt that the look of ISD , including a cover that some of our readers call '70s psychedelic, no longer reflected the highly sophisticated nature of design today--the work that you do on a daily basis. Because we know that you're extremely busy, we wanted a new design that would enable us to present you with useful technical information in a manner that's clear, highly readable, and inviting.

So, first of all, I want to recognize the graphic designer that turned ISD into the clean, crisp magazine you now see. His name is Alfredo Muccino, and his firm is Muccino Design Group in San Jose. He said he saw the job as a compelling challenge--an observation that clearly indicated we were long overdue for a makeover and reflected the difficulty of creating a distinctive but highly "reader-friendly" design for a technical audience.

Leading off the bold design is the cover itself. It resembles a journal just enough to connote the sense of a technical publication. But it also contains elements that are innovative for an engineering magazine, like the sideways "isd" and the large, white space at the top.

Alfredo also added the small circle on the cover containing the graphic element. You probably noticed that the illustration in the circle is fully presented in the art starting off the main feature. We thought it a clever solution to the design problem many of you complained about: how hard it was to read the cover lines. We also had Alfredo incorporate a request from readers to provide page numbers for all the stories listed on the cover.

No one, though, should be guilty of judging a book by its cover. If you look within--from the cover story on real-time protyping using programmable emulation hardware and FPGAs, to the use of advanced design tools for ESL design entry and clock tree generation, to the Focus Report on physical verification tools--you'll still find the compelling content that has made ISD popular with you, its readers, and at times a bane to its advertisers and other vendors. In addition you'll find a comprehensive benchmark comparing the performance of a Sun workstation against the latest 300-MHz Pentium II Windows NT PCs all running the latest version of Cadence Design Systems' Verilog-XL simulator, performed by James Lee of Seva Technologies and Contributing Editor John Miklosz. It's the first installment of a six-part special section, to appear every other month, presenting EDA platform benchmarks and NT EDA case studies.

At ISD , we've always believed that if you allowed engineers to describe their experiences creating complex IC designs, other engineers would want to read and learn from that shared knowledge. You've responded favorably as readers, and the policy has encouraged many of you to contribute to the publication. I want to invite those of you who haven't written for us to come forward and share your acquired expertise with your peers.

In this world, the only sources of information on tools and design methodology are designers and tool vendors. Your peers are much more likely to provide an objective explanation than a vendor with a tool to sell.

In fact, with the exception of a few major EDA companies, most tool vendors have written off the design engineer as a decision maker in the purchase of tools for their company. The commonly held belief is that corporate management is increasingly the only buyer an EDA company needs to influence to make a tool sale. We don't agree.

We believe that the designer is the critical element in making an IC work. He recommends and buys tools that he feels are best of breed to get his job done. He is the one tying disparate tools together to achieve a successful design. He is the craftsman that extracts the extra measure of performance from the tools to meet critical design criteria.

That's why we constantly strive to produce an editorial vehicle that will help the designer do his job better.

Again, we hope you like our new look, but pro or con, we encourage you to give us your opinion. You can e-mail me at jonah@isdmag.com.

I'd like to add a note about the EDA platform benchmark. We tested PCs from Compaq, Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, along with an Ultrasparc workstation from Sun. Of those, Dell fared the poorest. However, the Dell machine hadn't been configured for the requirements for simulation. We expect future systems to perform better.

To voice an opinion on this or any Integrated System Design article, please e-mail your message to miker@isdmag.com.

integrated system design  March 1998