Today I spent the whole day in meeting, from 10a.m. to 4p.m., lunch inclusived.? Our tool vender, Candence, visited us to give us update on their latest tool.? The license fee of those tools cost more than my salary by a two to one factor.? This is one reason why my job is fairly safe from outsourcing to India.? The Indian guys still have to use the same number of license as me, which drawf the cost saved in salary.? The meeting first start with us complaining the problems with their tools, we have gave them a long list of features enhancement.? Then followed by some presentation of their project roadmap.? They keep telling us the new features in the next version of their products.? I doubted the credit fo those semi-sales pitches.? From our past experience, we are manage to stress the new feature to their limits and crash the tool within a few weeks.? Then we spend endless time learning how to work around those limitation.? The products are just never as good as advertised.? The final section is a close door meeting between the managers to dicuss the pricing details of the tool.? I think we are simply paying too much.? The problem is there is no real alternative.? There are only two major EDA tool vender, and each tool has a very steep learning curve.? We are basically locked in with them.? On the flip side, the EDA is not a very good business either.? The are only limited number of customer specified in semiconductor design would by their tools.? In their road map, they call it major milestone for product deployment when they got 10 cusomters!

I have to make a disclaimer. I didn’t spread any rumours about Verona and her new potential date-to-be and I am not the one driving her so mad that she consider locking up her blog. The story begin yesterday lunch, me, Ray Woo, Jackson and Verona went to have lunch. Verona blog about her new date last week but didn’t mention any names. In the lunch, we were making fun of her new potential date-to-be. Me and Raymond make some harmless jokes, but some one spreads a rumour about who is the guy. He phased it as a riddle, but I couldn’t guess it right. Not because I am not smart enough, but because the answer is some guy I know of and I don’t think is him. Anyways, last night Verona is really upset and write in her blog someone is not respectful. I message Verona and apologized thought she is upset for my jokes in the afternoon. She explained to me that my joke is so obviously ridiculous that it is harmless and tell me the answer of Jackson’s riddle. Then I found out today Lesile, a good friend of Verona, called her and asked what happened. He thought I did it too. That’s why I ask Verona to state in her blog that I am innoncent. I guess I know I sometimes make the jokes too far that become offensive. Not only the third party think I did it, I myself think I did it too. The only difference is that I didn’t do it intentionally, I would apologize and admit my wrong doing. Not like someone that he don’t even care that he had offenced people. To make it worse, he keep making more fun out of the poor victim’s psychological suffering.

I treated Verona a nice sushi dinner tonight because my P.Eng application.? At first she lent me her textbook and study notes for the P.Eng practice exam, after some bargaining, I promised to treat her sushi if I passed the exam.? Later on, I found out APEG lost the reference from my professor.? Since my professor is really hard to find, I switched my reference to Verona and upgrade the sushi dinner.? She heard about this resturant in Aderdeen Center from her family friends.? Apparently, it has the coldest refrigerator in Vancouver, so it’s sushi must be top quality.? Actually it is a large sushi franchise in Japan, and this is their first oversea shops.? The fish is very fresh, but the portion is a bit too small.? We tried a few not very common fishes, kobe beef and uni seaweed roll.? The decoration of dishes looks really nice, too bad that we forgot to take pictures before we eat, we were just too hungry.? Verona told Pat about her stories of 200 balloons, got picked up in German and her dual professional qualification.? Pat find it quite funny, but I am a bit bored.? I have already heard those stories.? Somehow I am amazed Verona repeat the stories like playing tape recording, it is exactly the same as the version I heard.? Usually when I tell stories, the stories get improved over time.? The more times I tell the same story, it is more exciting and funny.? It may drift further away from what really happened though.

This week I have been spending some time learning PSL assertion at work.? Assertion is a new verification methodology pushing very hard from the EDA venders.? It is a complement to the traditional verification flow, which you have no visibility inside the device.? Assertion allows you put extra checks right into the RTL logics.? Actually assertion exists for VHDL quite a long time.? The problem is the awkward syntax and limit functionality.? PSL is just another implemeent and syntax for assertion.? It seems the industry? somehow agree to support this one standard across different hardware languages.? One thing quite interesting is PSL assertion is inserted to the code as comments begins with the keyword psl.? Some of our old code breaks because we have a block happenes to call psl and we have this reserved keyword all over the code in comments.? Anyways, PSL assertion is quite handy to writing conditional or sequence checks.? Much easier than building a state machine to predict the result.? The more powerful feature of PSL assertion is that it support formal verification, which use mathematical alogirthm verify the code is equivalent to the specification. However, formalv verification is always a promise never comes true.? I guess if there are algorithms checking the specification against the implmentation, how hard would it be to let the algorithm simplily generate the code.? My first experience with PSL assertion is quite good, except that I manage to crash the simulator merely learning PSL for a day.? I guess I am just naturally attractive to bugs.

Tonight after my philosophy class, I head over to a pub with some classmates.? They go drinking after class every Thuesday and talk about the lectures.? Since the professor finish the class a bit early, I decided to join them for a while.? The professor said he will join us next week too.? We head to the Cambie pub, which is just a few blocks away from SFU Harbour Center.? It is quite noisy there, not a very good place to chat.? The beer is good though.? Actually, beer is good anywhere.? We talked about communism and socialism today.? Somehow many of them are quite buy into the socialistic idea.? Today’s class talk about libertarianism, as know as the capitalism.? Almost everyone agree the argument for libertariansim in the textbook are flawed, even worse than the argument for liberal equality from last week.? Oddly though, the textbook didn’t defense libertarianism from utilitarianism point of view.? I find it is easiest to defend capitalism using classical economy since the days of Adam Smiths.? Granted, the efficiency of free market has its limit, where it may not work in some cases, but at least it get rid of the puzzling fair argument.? My classmates think socialism is the most fair political system.? We will learn about that next week.? For myself, I am actually an egoist.? I will support whatever system that benefit me most.? From my experience, free market capitalism is the most reasonable choice.? Of course, I won’t mind totalitarian state if I am the dictictor.? I think collective egoism will result in free market capitalism.? I support Rawl’s contract hypothesis, only that it should not be blind folded.? I think it is fair and just that we are born unequal, because that’s the reality.