Feedback

A forum for readers to speak their mind on issues that are important to the design community

No engineers? Wanna bet?

To the Editor:

I'm hoping you can get a message to the letter writer who wanted to bet me I couldn't get more engineers than he could count on his hand also withheld his name [Feedback, ". . . Or stop worrying and keep up-to-date," October, p. 12]. I'll take any bet! I've got two hands, two feet, and a deck of cards and that still won't be enough for him to count the number of engineers I can assemble immediately. I find it amusing that he's from San Diego--which is only slightly behind Silicon Valley in cost of living, crowded highways, and so on--and that he faces the same difficulty in recruiting. Narrow-mindedness is the culprit.

I stick to my story: Companies need to be forward-thinking. They need to quit resisting and start embracing change, learning to utilize remote sites where the resources are available, and taking the task to the resource. The Web makes all of that possible. We have enough engineers; we don't have enough corporate executives who are willing to think with open minds about the possibilities raised by the very technology they develop.

Dan Ganousis
President
Questmark Design Services
Boulder, Colo.

VSIA's not led by EDA

To the Editor:

Your November editorial ["Coming to Grips with Using Reusable IP," p. 6] correctly identifies some of the difficulties of integrating IP and making it reusable and some of the issues that need to be addressed. As you point out, the Virtual Socket Interface Alliance is working on developing standards to address those issues.

However, you also comment that "VSIA is led by EDA vendors whose ultimate product will be a political document shaped to satisfy the conflicting interests of its members." In fact, VSIA is definitely not led by EDA vendors. VSIA president Howard Sachs is a vice president at Fujitsu, and Takeshi Fuse, also of Fujitsu, chairs the Virtual Component Transfer Development Working Group. Additionally, the 11-member Steering Working Group consists of representatives from seven semiconductor (or combined semi and system) companies, three EDA companies (two of which have IP groups as well), and one IP company. Six of the seven DWGs are chaired by semiconductor companies; only one is chaired by an EDA company.

Any standards organization or effort must represent all industry views. That's why VSIA includes system, semiconductor, EDA, and IP companies. Developing standards or adopting de facto standards that represent these industries is certainly a challenge, as is the SOC challenge overall; but that doesn't mean it has to become a "political" decision. In just two years, several VSIA DWGs (representing all segments) have issued technical specifications. We expect more for release early next year.

Susan Cain
Staff and marketing committee member
Virtual Socket Interface Alliance
Los Gatos, Calif.

Jonah McLeod replies:

Yes, Susan is absolutely right in taking me to task for stating that VSIA is dominated by EDA companies. However, I stand by the rest of my statement. Standards organizations lack the market force to establish standards. The failure of the CAD Framework Initiative bears witness to that fact. In the United States, the market--not committees--sets standards.

An affinity for NT

To the Editor:

In your November benchmark article ["EDA Platform Benchmark: Simulation and Synthesis at the Same Time," p. 50], you noted that on your dual-processor system, a single job would run faster when a second job was running "interference." I've had a similar experience on a quad-processor Windows NT system when running multiple 130-Mbyte simulations. I suspect that the cache is being thrashed.

One way to lock a process to an individual processor is to use the Set Affinity option of the NT Task Manager. Start the Task Manager, open the Processes tab, click on the desired process, then right-click to bring up a menu. Select the Set Affinity option. Check only one of the CPU check boxes and click OK. To lock a group of jobs in a batch script to a single processor, set the affinity on the CMD.EXE process before starting a job or batch script. All processes started from this command prompt window will inherit the processor affinity you set on the CMD.EXE window.

For example, to run two parallel simulation jobs, open two command prompt windows, then set affinity to CPU 0 on the first window and set affinity to CPU 1 on the second window. Use the NT Task Manager Performance tab to verify that your jobs aren't swapping between CPUs. You must set the View -> CPU History -> One Graph Per CPU menu item to display each CPU as a separate histogram.

Glenn Poole
Hardware design consultant
Poole Design
Fremont, Calif.

James Lee replies:

You're quite right. This is a great tip for the readers, but it would have been unfair of us to help out NT by setting the affinity. We were aware of the techniques you describe, but we were benchmarking, not teaching NT tricks.

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

integrated system design  January 1999