Subject: FedEx, McDonald's, and the Mentor C-synthesis Blue Book contest

As I opened the door of my house to go meet some friends at a local Chinese
restaurant for lunch, there was a FedEx guy was unexpectedly standing there
directly in front of me.

"Are you John Cooley?", he asked.

"Uh...  Yes.", I replied.

"This is for you."  He handed me a package, turned and walked briskly back
to his truck.  Since it was from Mentor Graphics and it wasn't ticking, I
figured it was safe to open.  Inside was a copy of their new Blue Book that
they've been yarping about so much lately.  It's to teach you how to write
C source for C-to-Verilog-RTL synthesis.

I pawed through it quickly.  "Lots of code examples.  Lots of pics.  Good.
Looks like light reading.  I should probably give it a read.", I thought
to myself at the time.

I threw it in my car, drove to lunch, and completely forgot about it.

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Time passes...

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I'm driving by myself to Vermont.  I stop at McDonald's for a quick bite to
eat.  Looking in my car for something to read during dinner, I find the
Blue Book.  "Why not?  It has pics.  Looks simple enough."

What I read:

   PREFACE: "blah blah blah the author is a real engineer blah blah
             blah Hitachi and Thales Aerospace use this blah blah"

   TABLE OF CONTENTS: Lots of common sense HW design details.  Cool!

   CHAPTER 1: "blah blah Mentor CatapultC Marketing Pitch Here blah"

   CHAPTER 2: "blah use makefiles, use testbenches, use headers blah"

   CHAPTER 3: For C++ HW design, you need a bit-accurate data type.
              SystemC is OK as a bit-accurate data type, but it is too
              slow during simulation run time.  Mentor's AC_datatypes
              class lib is a bit-accurate data type that sims fast.

   CHAPTER 4: data flow graphs, loops, scheduling, resource
              allocation, latency, throughput, initiation intervals

Lots of pics and code examples -- much better than the Behavioral Compiler
training that I did at Synopsys some 10,000 lifetimes ago.

I finished my Big Mac and continued driving to Vermont.

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A little more time passes...

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Long story short, Mentor shanghaied me into being a guinea pig for their
upcoming "Test Your C-IQ" multiple-guess contest.

The first version of the quiz was bad.  I stopped after 11 minutes because
of so many Mentor CatC-is-GREAT Marketing questions in it.  I was disgusted
and let them know it.

Second version was 11 questions that took 14 minutes.  Got a 78% score on
that.  It still had two Marketing CatC-is-GREAT Marketing questions.

Eventually they FINALLY cut the marketing Q's, so it's now a quick 4 minute
true ENGINEERING ONLY test for C-based design with only 5 questions.  Check
it out:
               http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RDCZSSR

Everyone who takes the quiz is entered into a drawing for 40 Blue Books,
plus the top scorers are put in a drawing for an iPod Touch 4.

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Over time, the Blue Book kept me coming back.  What I've later read:

   CHAPTER 5: I/O scheduling, conditional vs unconditional, Ready/ACK/wait,
              stalling/flushing pipelines, read, arrays mapped to memories

   CHAPTER 6: sequential and combinational hardware, shift registers,
              Log2Ceil, MUXes, LFSR, barrel shifters, adder trees,
              Lookup Tables

   CHAPTER 7: memory architectures, interleaving, single and
              dual port RAMs, 1-D data streams, 2-D windowing

   CHAPTER 8: hierarchical design, arrays shared between blocks,
              passing control variables between blocks, control I/O,
              latency between blocks, reconvergence, deadlock,
              pipeline flushing, FIFO's

I have yet to read the following, but I skimmed:

   CHAPTER 9: ac_channel stuff, non-blocking reads, arbitration

Chapters 10 and 11 appear to be swimming with FIR filters, FFT's, etc.

With all the pics and code examples, the Blue Book was a good first intro
to C-to-RTL synthesis for me.  I'm glad I got a copy of it.  At least now
I understand ~50% of what the C synth guys say.  Before it was under 5%!

    - John Cooley
      DeepChip.com                               Holliston, MA

  FULL DISCLOSURE: This is paid coverage of an EDA promotion.  Yea,
  it was fun, but I got paid to write this.  And it was for a promo
  only.  I never do paid coverage nor paid endorsements of ANY EDA
  TOOLS NOR COMPANIES.  (See Q7, Q8, Q9 here for an explaination.)