ASIC Design the 90's and early 2K's

The dawn of 90's saw the golden era of computing. Microprocessors were getting powerful every year as they followed Moore's Law. 90's saw the x86 chipset display sufficient power to enable investment in GUI's and other efforts to make the computer more user friendly. A similar effect was also seen in the ASIC market. New powerful applications. were now required to harness the improvements in ASIC design.
So teams which till now were satisfied to throw out a micro controller dominated SOC bundled with some limited peripherals started bundling more and more peripheral hardware until the microcontroller was reduced to a fraction of the total SOC area.
A second effort in progress was in the standards organisation. These organisations were now defining the new dawn of the communication era as they started work on defining standards like bluetooth, WLAN, DTV, DSL, the family of mobile Standards etc.

Towards the late 90's we started seeing each of these standards coming out of their draft status. This was the second boost to the ASIC design industry as innumerable startup's mushroomed trying to get their slice of the ASIC market by defining communication chipsets. Anyone who has worked in the ASIC industry in the early 2k's would have certainly spent some time working on chips based on one of these standards.

The future of semiconductor design industry. Or Is there any future in ASIC Design?

Semiconductor industry is composed of multiple parts. I do not claim to be an expert in all the sectors of this industry. My outlook towards the design aspect of the industry may not be shared by the manufacturing side of it. Having stated my disclaimer as above let me now get on stage and put across my thoughts on where the industry is headed.

I will be posting a series of articles capturing my thoughts on the past present and future of this industry.

Capturing thoughts, An Idea can strike anywhere. Are you ready to capture it? People mostly prefer a pen and paper method for capturing the idea simply because they can carry a small pocketbook anywhere and everywhere. For a software professional who spends most of his working period in front of the computer a software application is preferable. But the question remains which application? When the thought strikes you is the application available and ready to capture your thought? or do you need to navigate through a set of menu's to launch it then a set of tabs/dialog's to enter your thought into your system?
There were a few posts on how to do this through launchy. But the technique is general enough to work with any system

1. For a unix shell you can write a single line shell script add.sh which will "echo`date` $*>>~todo.txt" Or write an equivalent alias.
   
2. For windows you have a batch script add.bat which will "echo %DATE% @ %TIME% %*>>C:\\todo.txt"
3. This script can now be called in multitude of ways via a terminal, WIN+R, launchy, gnome-do, etc. to capture the idea that you have.

I am using a simple format string of
project:delegatedTo, Task description @context time
e.g.
book:me, setup lunch with editor @phone tomorrow

Perl and ruby have plugins to translate natural language date strings to the actual dd-mm-yyy dates anyone who has used google calander knows what I am talking about.
so instead of teh batch scripts we can have a simple perl script to parse the above string and put it into the necessary format
today is 07-02-2009 so we want perl to translate the above string to
book:me, setup lunch with editor @phone 08-02-2009


So we have captured the above string but what can we do with it?
Let us add a few more options to our perl script to convert the data to XML Format. Once we have our task in XML Format it is a matter of a few XSLT files or maybe more perl script to convert our tasklist to freemind, planner, ganttproject or Microsoft Excel
The perlscript to perform the task capture and convert it to XML is available here

GTD Getting things done.... Collecting thoughts

Each thought has the following attributes

1. Task title and details
   
2. Project: The project to which this thought belongs.
3. Context: Where should I be/ What should I be doing in order to do this task.
4. Owner: Who should be doing this task
5. Deadline: By when should this be done.
6. Captured On: When was this item captured.

Currently I am capturing my thoughts using launchy. Any global hotkey based text capturing tool should do. for e.g. with launchy I hit ALT+Space and capture the highlighted text in the popup window.
This line captures most of the items listed above

1. Task title: Setup lunch with publisher
   
2. Project: default. I could have also written this as book:me to indicate the project name (book)
   
3. Context: @phone
4. Owner: me
5. Deadline: wednesday
6. Captured On: done by the backend script when I press enter.

This is good for informal captures. For a formal capture a spreadsheet or a plain text file may be better. as long as we maintain the format of
:person,task details @context time
we can capture any thought in this system.
Inthe next post we will discuss the next step of classification

getting things done... My experiments with David Allens GTD system

I have experimented with various systems to keep track of my Action Items/Schedules and TODO Lists below are the things I have experimented till date.

Things I have been using

1. freemind: Mind mapping tool
   
2. monkey gtd +prism:
   
3. taskjuggler
4. ganttproject
5. taglog

My understanding of the GTD system.

1. Collect: Collect thoughts This could be either
   
   1. Planned: Where I spend a pre allocated time to jot down my thoughts. For example spending an hour today to make a list of what I should do before going on a holiday. For Planned collection of thoughts freemind is the best tool.
   
   
   2. Unplanned: You are working on something and suddenly remember that you need to get a new pair of socks for that trip. for unplanned thought collection it is a mix of what is handy when the thought occurs... I have tried paper and monkey GTD and am finally moving to a mix of launchy and perl scripts
   
   


2. Classify: Here the captured thought's are moved into either Action Items or filed for reference. This has to be a planned event so a job for either freemind or monkey GTD
   
   Action Items can be classified into multiple categories
   
   1. based on duration: Short term (Less than a day), mid term ( a day or two), Long term (weeks/months/Years)
   2. Based on priority: urgent important, urgent not important, important not urgent, not urgent not important
   3. Based on who should do it: me, delegate
      
   
   
3. Track: Traking requires regular review of the action items and can take the form of todo list or capturing the activities done per day.
   

The problem I am facing is that there is no unified GTD system I can use while working. Let use see what a few perl scripts can do about it