EDN talks with David Stewart, founder and chief executive officer of CriticalBlue, about hardware/software co-design, multicore programming, and more. David Stewart is founder and chief executive officer of CriticalBlue (Edinburgh, Scotland) and has more than 20 years’ experience in the EDA and semiconductor industries—10 of which he spent at Cadence Design Systems, where he was a founder and business-development director of the SOC (system-on-chip)-design facility at the Alba Campus in Scotland.
Some of the questions David answered are:
* What special challenges do you face when working with customers and employees around the world?
* What advice would you give to other start-ups about the challenges of doing business globally?
* What are the biggest challenges that your customers are trying to deal with right now?
* How well has the industry dealt with this problem?
* What does CriticalBlue focus on in the multicore and hardware/software areas?
“In the multicore space, we’ve been doing a lot of work to help people analyze software that they have and figure out how to redeploy it on multicore architectures—for example, a single, standard RISC core and then multiple coprocessors. So, you might look at analyzing some software running on an ARM processor and what you need to do to that software to be able to put it onto multiple coprocessors as well as the ARM.”
