Wally Rhines
Leading Mentor Down the Path Less Traveled

Wally Rhines doesn’t follow the crowd. He’s made a career of betting on the dark horse and tackling the unpopular assignment. As the semiconductor industry’s version of Warren Buffet, Rhines has consistently picked the out-of-favor or under-performing business with big turnaround potential. When Wally took his position as CEO of Mentor Graphics in 1993, he was assuming the helm of a ship that many believed was sinking fast. Mentor had launched its epic “Falcon Framework” with great fanfare, only to be besieged by unhappy customers in a market that was moving fast away from frameworks and toward point tool design methodologies. This was not a new situation to Rhines, however. He had previously engineered a turnaround in TI’s ASIC and microprocessor group, converting it from dog to darling by refocusing on the rapidly emerging digital signal processing (DSP) business.

One is immediately put at ease by Wally’s warm, engaging style. During his decade at Mentor, he’s made a practice of listening - listening to anyone at the company that wanted to talk to him, keeping the door open, and maintaining an approachability that few CEOs manage. The result is that he more often hears the truth about an issue, rather than an overspun version distilled for executive consumption. In the hallways at Mentor he is known as just “Wally,” and he is liked and respected throughout the company.

Wally’s interest in computers began in high school where he worked as a night operator on IBM 709 and 1401 systems during his senior year. He took computer classes at the University of Michigan while studying chemical engineering, finally leaving with an undergraduate degree in metallurgical engineering. He then went on to graduate studies at Stanford where he began to refine his practice of contrarian philosophy. “I tended to do things other people didn’t do,” Rhines says. “I did the first electronics-related thesis there. Craig Barrett (Intel CEO) was one of my faculty advisors.” Rhines was particularly interested in Gallium Arsenide as a material for semiconductors and did research on that topic in graduate school. [more]

Energy Efficient Application Design using FPGAs  
by Sumit Mohanty and Viktor K. Prasanna, University of Southern California

Traditionally, FPGAs are not considered suitable for low-power application design because of higher quiescent power, significant energy dissipation during start-up, and higher dynamic power due to longer interconnects and overheads for reconfigurability. However, with advances in FPGA manufacturing technologies and growing demand for feature-rich mobile applications in both civilian and military communities FPGAs are being considered an attractive device for applications deployed in power-constrained environments. Some of the reasons for considering FPGA for energy efficient application design are:

-- In general, FPGAs are denser, use lower supply voltage, and provide more computation per Watt than the previous generation of devices. Contrary to the concern, the latest 90 nm devices from both Xilinx and Altera are more power efficient. According to a previous article, the Xilinx Virtex 4 is more than 50% more power efficient than their previous generations;

-- Non-volatile Flash based configuration memory available in some FPGAs (e.g. Actel ProASIC PLUS) allows rapid and power efficient startup;

-- Partial reconfiguration enables use of a smaller number of FPGAs and dynamic reconfiguration for low-power design (e.g. Xilinx Virtex-II series); [more]