Keynote 1(Continued): Inception of Intel 8086

It wasn’t that bigger deal for Intel because they thought, at the time, it will be 250,000 chips will be sold for 5 years, which isn’t that many. But they were wrong. It was a 100Million computers were sold. And suddenly 8086 from being an emergency back-up was an over-night success and had a very bright future, because it was binary compatible of PC software, and so had great opportunity

Isn’t that an inspiring story?

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A new golden age for computer architecture by Prof. David Patterson

In last 50 years, there are 3 lessons that we can draw. First – software advances can inspire architecture innovations. Second – when we raise the hardware/software interface, it creates opportunities for architecture innovation. Third – in our field, the way we settle these debates, isn’t by just arguing in a bar, rather people spent/invest billions of dollars to investigate their ideas and marketplace settles these debates

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An overview of Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2018

That’s exactly what happened in DAC2018 at Moscone Center, San Francisco. I was invited for a talk in DAC summer school, on my work “vsdflow” which is also one of the main topics of discussion in my “TCL programming” course on Udemy. I would say, the entire DAC was a journey of events, exchange of ideas between brightest minds of the world.

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From VLSI to System Design (SoC) – The choice of SPI

SPI model is a master/slave model. There’s some SPI master which determines who gets to transmit and who gets to receive. The output from SPI master is called MOSI (Master Out Slave In). If you have 2 slaves, slave 1 and slave 2, as shown below, MOSI goes to all the slaves .Then you have another line MISO (Master In Slave Out). All the wires are connected, as shown in below image. Then you have a master only function called SCLK, which goes to all the slaves. Now also, there must be a slave select (SS) for S1 and a slave select for S2.

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Bottoms up – From STA to RISC-V architecture

In on opensource RISC-V implementation flow, you move from right (Hardware) to Left (application program), and then coming from left, if you stop at middle (RISC-V ISA), that’s when you start thinking about this architecture from all angles, like sta, drc, congestion, clock skew, io latency, static and dynamic power, IR and many more

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