| UPDATED:
February 1, 2023 at 8:20 p.m.
Tyler Reyburn’s first two years of high school baseball wasn’t cutting it. He needed to find a way to level up behind the plate and beside it. Two and a half months ago, the Mead junior catcher joined VTool Elite Development, a training facility located in Broomfield, seeking to improve his game with the help of a few former and current professionals. In a short amount of time, he’s not only increased his power at the plate. He gets to catch from pitchers at every level of the game. One of its co-founders, Legacy alum and current Rockies reliever Lucas Gilbreath, has served as a mentor for the young catcher as he looks to give back to the community that helped mold him on the mound. Shawn Kirkman, VTool’s director of sports performance, helped Reyburn unlock his peak physical performance as Holy Family alum Nick Kreutzer has altered his hitting mechanics. Reyburn is better off for it. “The biggest thing for me — and always has been — has just been getting bigger, just being stronger to be able to handle playing at the varsity level and being ready to play at the varsity level,” Reyburn said. “It’s been very eye-opening to be in here and just seeing what these really high-level guys look like and where I need to be to be able to handle them effectively.”
Reyburn hopes that with their guidance, he can not only become a reliable starter and leader for the Mavericks, but a force that can propel the team into the playoffs. He’s clearly in the right place for that. Christopher Stark / For the Longmont Times-Call
VTool, located in Broomfield, provides local baseball players with an outlet to train and finesse their hitting, pitching and catching skills. Providing an outlet for northern Colorado
When the opportunity presented itself to Gilbreath and his partners, Tom Dedin Jr. and Tim Naiman, a year and a half ago, they jumped at the chance to build a business that could bring much-needed baseball development to the place Gilbreath calls home. On a January Friday night, the pings of balls connecting with the bats of aspiring young ballplayers rang through a facility teeming with talent. The coaches at VTool use a wide range of technology to educate their players in both the mental and physical aspects of the game, including Rapsodo (pitch design), 4D motion with biomechanics sensors, pocket radar and laser timers. They train the athletes through speed and agility metrics and weightlifting while working on throwing and pitching velocities, among other techniques. The project gave Gilbreath an outlet of his own, as he worked his way back from an elbow flexor strain that sidelined him prematurely during a promising 2022 season. Prior to his exit, he had amassed a 4.19 ERA through 43 innings. When he wasn’t rehabbing his arm, he was imparting his wisdom on high school and middle school players in and around the Denver area. The program completed a vision he held since he was first drafted by the Rockies in 2014 — when his high school career ended — then again in 2017. “For me, it was all about just giving Colorado kids a better opportunity,” Gilbreath said. “Especially northern kids, I think, are slightly limited in what resources they have, the things they have access to. It was a cool opportunity for me to be able to give back in a sense of some of the things I’ve learned along with giving these guys better and better opportunities.”
The mentorship came with an unexpected twist for the 26-year-old major leaguer as he examined his own pitching mechanics on the road to recovery, which is just about complete. He heads to Arizona for Spring Training on Friday. “There was a time when I was talking to the kids about (how) I struggle with staying in my back leg, because I want to tip,” he said. “One of the kids told me, ‘Well, if you get into your knee and your butt, you’re not going to tip.’ It was a seventh-grader giving me advice. The next week, I started trying it and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. This kid is on to something.’ Sometimes they simplify the game in a way that helps you think about it from a better perspective.’”
Gilbreath isn’t the only local player to bring his professional career to the forefront of VTool. Chris Tilley / Associated Press
Lucas Gilbreath, a Legacy alum and current Colorado Rockies reliever, co-founded VTool to provide an elite training facility for baseball players in northern Colorado. Last  year, after Holy Family alum Nick Kreutzer (2015) completed his independent league career with the Eastside Diamond Hoppers in Michigan, VTool reached out, asking him to join their team. Dedin knew he could provide valuable insight as both a power hitter and someone whose career took an unconventional path. Kreutzer jumped at the opportunity to keep feeding his passion, even though his playing days were behind him. “We live in a bubble here in Broomfield, Colorado, to where this really isn’t how the real world works, even the baseball world works,” Kreutzer said. “I just try and give them a little insight into how the game is supposed to be because high school baseball is honestly really easy. “A guy hitting .300 is a good player who’s not a great player, and then the higher up you get, that .300 number becomes great. I’m trying to get them to understand that just because you’re a good player now doesn’t mean you can just be content where you’re at. You have to keep growing in order to get to where you want to be.”
Growth is what VTool is all about, and the response has been overwhelming. In less than two years of existence, the business is expanding with a second location in Mead, in partnership with ForWARD Training. Gilbreath is excited to expand VTool’s outreach and work with more players like Reyburn achieve their full potential as he strives to reach his once again. “I think the demand has been even greater than we expected,” Gilbreath said. “We started VTool with a vision to try to help offer as many athletes as possible elite training via high-level technology and methodology. We have had some great results and a lot of kids have worked their butts off to develop fast.”

VTool, run by local alumni, providing valuable baseball training to young athletes

Visual debug; LPDDR5 update; new Cadence CEO; financial reports. Tools
Vtool released a new version of its Cogita visual debug platform. New features aim to provide faster debug capabilities, including visual representation of test results using log files as input, improved manipulation and navigation throughout big logs, ML algorithms to classify data and find the relationship between inputs, and the ability to merge and compare test flow of two different tests/runs and in the same view to quickly spot the differences of passing and failing log files. Cadence reported financial results for the second quarter 2021 with revenue of $728 million, up 14.1% from the second quarter of 2020. On a GAAP basis, Q2 2021 income was $0.56 per share, up 19.2% from $0.47 per share in the same quarter last year. Non-GAAP earnings were $0.86 per share, up 30.3% from $0.66. The company is raising its outlook for the year. Anirudh Devgan will take over as CEO of Cadence in December. Current CEO Lip-Bu Tan will transition to the role of executive chairman. Tan has been CEO since 2009. Devgan has served as president of Cadence since 2017 and oversees all the research and development, sales and field engineering as well as corporate strategy, marketing and business development groups, including mergers and acquisitions. He will remain president. FPGA
Xilinx reported first quarter 2022 financial results with revenue of $879 million, up 21% from the same quarter last year. On a GAAP basis, Q1 2022 earnings per share were $0.83, up 118% from $0.38 in Q1 2021. Non-GAAP earnings were $0.95 per share, up 46% from $0.65 in the same quarter last year. “Record Q1 revenues were driven by strength in the Data Center end market, as well as a record quarters for our Industrial, Broadcast and Consumer end markets. This drove 3% sequential and 21% year-over-year growth,” said Brice Hill, Xilinx CFO. “Advanced Products grew 2% sequentially and 27% annually, and represented 72% of total revenue. Top line performance drove record free cash flows of $373 million, or 42% of revenue.”
Memory
JEDEC published an update to the LPDDR5 standard that is focused on improving performance, power and flexibility, and a new LPDDR5X standard, which is an optional extension to LPDDR5. The two standards are designed to boost memory speed and efficiency for a variety of uses including mobile devices and AI applications. Updates include a speed extension up to 8533 Mbps (versus up to 6400 Mbps), signal integrity improvements with TX/RX equalization, and reliability improvements with a new Adaptive Refresh Management feature. The LPDDR5X optional extension offers higher bandwidth and simplified architecture in support of enhanced 5G communication performance. Micron started volume shipping of its 176-layer NAND Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 3.1 mobile solution. Targeted at high-end and flagship phones, it has up to 75% faster sequential write and random read performance and 15% faster mixed workload performance than prior generations. Embedded
Infineon debuted a high-voltage microcontroller with USB Power Delivery 3.1 support. The USB PD MCUs targets embedded systems that provide or consume power with high-voltage up to 28 V. It includes an Arm Cortex-M0/M0+ processor with up to 256 KB Flash memory and 32 KB SRAM, USB full-speed device, programmable general purpose input/output pins, gate drivers, low drop out regulators, and high-voltage protection circuits. Market research firm IC Insights is forecasting a 21% jump in IC unit shipments this year, reaching 391.2 billion units. IC unit shipments dropped 6% in 2019, then rose 8% in 2020. AI
Cloud processor company Ampere Computing will acquire OnSpecta, a provider of AI optimization software. “The addition of deep learning expertise will enable Ampere to deliver a more robust platform for inference task processing with lower power, higher performance and better predictability than ever,” said Renee James, founder, chairman and CEO of Ampere Computing. The companies have already been collaborating and have demonstrated over 4x acceleration on Ampere-based instances running popular AI-inference workloads. “This is a natural progression to the strong collaboration we already have with Ampere,” said Indra Mohan, co-founder and CEO of OnSpecta. “Our team will greatly benefit from being a part of Ampere as we help build upon the great success of Ampere Altra and provide critical support to customers as they apply the Altra product family to a wide variety of AI inference use cases.” The acquisition will include an optimized model zoo with object detection, video processing and recommendation engines. Founded in 2017, OnSpecta is based in Redwood City, Calif. Terms were not disclosed; the deal is expected to close in August. Technische Universität Dresden, the University of Manchester, Racyics, and GlobalFoundries collaborated to tape out the SpiNNaker2 chip, a neuromorphic AI processor. Designed to scale up to a 70,000 chip cloud system while maintaining strict real time operation, SpiNNaker2 has an event-based compute architecture with power management and custom AI hardware acceleration. “There is still a great deal to learn from biology if we are to realize the full potential of AI in the future. SpiNNaker2 has been designed to bridge the gulf between realistic brain models and AI so that each may increasingly be informed by the other,” said Prof. Steve Furber of the University of Manchester. The full 10 Mio core SpiNNaker2 machine, called ‘SpiNNcloud,’ will be deployed at Technische Universität Dresden for research purposes. It will also be made commercially available through the new startup SpiNNcloud Systems. The U.S. National Science Foundation established 11 new NSF National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes, joining seven announced last year with a total funding of $220 million. Each will focus on AI-based technologies in a range of specific research areas: human-AI interaction, AI for optimization, cyberinfrastructure, computer and network systems, dynamic systems, augmented learning, and agriculture. Safety & security
Synopsys added Rapid Scan capabilities to its Coverity static application security testing and Black Duck software composition analysis solutions. Rapid Scan is aimed at providing fast, lightweight vulnerability detection for both proprietary and open source code during the early stages of development. Cadence’s Tensilica Xtensa processors with FlexLock have been certified by SGS-TÜV Saar to meet the ISO 26262:2018 standard to ASIL-D. The functional safety certification spans from base microcontroller to high-performance DSP, each with a configuration option for FlexLock to provide increased random fault protection and developed to protect against systematic faults.

Week In Review: Design, Low Power

Sweeping Changes Ahead For System Architectures

Continuous education is essential for engineers, but many companies don’t recognize the value or they are unwilling to provide the necessary resources. This should be a line of questioning before every new hire makes the decision about where they want to work, because it not only affects their future career, but also impacts the value they can provide to that company during the course of their employment. “Everybody owns their own career,” says Bonnie Willoughby, technical education thought leader at Siemens EDA . “Everybody is responsible for coming up to speed on industry advances. Everyone should work with a mentor or a manager to make sure that it is an environment where learning can happen.”
Learning needs a structure. “In many organizations, management assumes the engineer could solve any problem with a stack of manuals and a little time,” says Nancy Henson, principal practice manager for National Instruments. “Other misconceptions include expecting vendor training to be sufficient, or presuming that engineers prefer working in silos. After decades of neglecting learning and letting training devolve to an after-thought, many companies now seek guidance on training engineers.”
There are benefits for all involved. “An effective engineering training program could increase engineering efficiency by at least 20%.”
In some companies, this is part of the culture. “Continuing education is important for us, and that should not be a surprise given our ties to École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL),” says Amin Shokrollahi, founder and CEO of Kandou. “In fact, it’s part of our corporate culture.”
Others see education as being a part of the products they provide. “The future of work is really about the future of talent,” says Shivananda R Koteshwar, group director at Synopsys . “Training helps our users stay ahead of the curve with expert-led courses and allows users to strengthen their skills. The users also provide valuable input via unique use cases, which serve to further R&D cycles for the product.”
That feedback loop can be even more pronounced for some companies. “Education of the market is virtuous,” says Isabelle Geday, general manager of Arteris IP deployment. “Having this position understood by potential customers is a very good start for a relationship. They tend to trust us, not only from a technical point of view, but from a company point of view. When they perceive that we want them to be smarter — to be able to gain ownership of the standard, and of the solutions that come with the standard — that’s something that is really good for our image. It’s beneficial for them, and it’s also beneficial for us.”
Some people take it on as a personal responsibility. “Twice in my career, I’ve been a visiting lecturer or professor at universities,” says Simon Davidmann, founder and CEO of Imperas Software . “The role is to provide interesting information about the state of the art of current technology. I try to help undergraduates understand the area of electronic design, which isn’t really covered much in universities. I believe you have to move people forward and educate them.”
Where should one turn to get the necessary education? “Continuous education is an important part of every engineering job,” says Ashish Darbari, CEO of Axiomise. “It can come from a variety of sources, including tool vendors, independent training houses and consultants, internal experts, or the Internet.”
Making that selection can be important. “Selecting the best source of training can be a complex decision, and the best option depends on the type of content and the needs of the project team,” says Matt Rushton, training manager for partner enablement at Arm . “Trusted content direct from a provider is the obvious approach — those who are directly involved in the creation and the support of the products in question sharing their vast amounts of knowledge and expertise. However, using an approved training partner or consultant has its merits too, offering a broader and perhaps more agnostic outlook with a diverse industry perspective. Training in whichever form is critical, saving time, effort and money by avoiding costly design mistakes.”
The source may change, depending on the type of training required. “Some areas, such as training associated with language and tools, can be learned using training programs and material available online,” says Olivera Stojanovic, business development and project manager for VTool . “Other skills, such as debug, can only be gained by hands-on experience, and can be enriched by learning from more senior engineers.”
And training is evolving. “The information and the technology are changing at the speed of light,” says Siemens’ Willoughby. “If you had asked me 10 years ago how it is possible for engineers to be up to date with what’s happening, maybe you would get a very different answer. The industry trend with education has changed significantly.”
Management commitment
All training has to start with a commitment from management. “Success requires a commitment of resources,” says NI’s Henson. “Training efforts that fail are usually those that follow the historical model of hoping someone finds enough spare time to pull together a training plan. Management must invest.”
For some companies, that starts with the hiring process. “Continuous education starts during hiring with a well-ordered training program,” says Abhijit Chakrabathy, general manager for India operations at Verific. “We don’t expect new hires to be experts in SystemVerilog, C++, compiler technology, and digital design.”
Without training being an integral part of a job, it can be difficult to get the necessary approvals. “Maybe you have to ask to have your schedule free so you can attend five days of training,” says Willoughby. “New types of education may make that easier, and hopefully if you went to your manager and asked them to invest in a year’s subscription for you for online education, where you can get educated as you go along the way, and as you’re using the tools to be able to research something to do the labs on your own — then hopefully you’re going to have an easier time getting a ‘yes.’ That is an investment in you. That is an investment in the company.”
But it is not just technical training that is important. “Most engineers do not go through soft skills training,” says Milos Mirosavljevic, verification engineering manager for VTool. “This encompasses communication within the team, with the client, how to mentor and lead others, goal setting, time and attention management, and active listening skills. These are all especially important when an engineer becomes the leader of the team. In most cases, skilled engineers become the team leaders, and that role requires a completely different set of skills.”
In many cases, that requires additional training. “While pure technical skills are most certainly the main determinant in what constitutes a good engineer, when soft skills are also added to the pool, an engineer becomes more complete,” adds Mirosavljevic. “We have recognized the importance of these skills and are actively developing dedicated programs to develop our engineers and help them accelerate their careers.”
Instructor-led training
Going to an offsite location for several days of training traditionally has been the way most training happens. For large companies, vendors often will bring it to them, but it still requires concentrated blocks of time. “Immersing oneself in a single topic for multiple days helps ideas stick,” says Henson. “I can sleep on ideas, pelt my instructor with questions, and learn from my peers in the classroom. Ideally, once the pandemic is over, many of us will return to in-person instructor-led training (ILT). We understand more fully when we are in the room with the instructor who is observing either the quizzical look or the ‘I got this’ look on the faces of the course attendees.”
One-size-fits-all training can be inefficient. “There are training programs for verification languages and methodologies, as well as demo sessions for EDA tools,” says VTool’s Stojanovic. “However, engineers often use only 20% of tools’ capabilities, so we see this as a potential area of improvement for tool vendors. By investing more time in education, for a wider range of tools functionalities, we can show them the usability and value of each capability. Tool vendors should apply a more assertive and more frequent approach toward users, as well as promote the availability of new features. Also, the flow of information should be in both directions, listening and taking into consideration the problems and pains that engineers are facing in their everyday work.”
The pandemic had a serious impact on this. “The pandemic, whether we like it or not, forced the entire community, even non-engineers, to accept other methods of education,” says Willoughby. “If we had suggested online education 15 years ago, there were so many more people saying, ‘I need an instructor.’ Now we’re able to do a lot of virtual online classes, where they still have access to an instructor. It is more cost-effective. You don’t have to leave your office. You don’t have travel costs. There are more cost-effective ways to do education, and hopefully that’s making it easier for the manager to invest in their employees and provide them with the necessary education.”
Initially, this was not without some difficulties. “People used to attend a workshop or the training sessions and they got the material,” says Arteris IP’s Geday. “It was a little complicated to do the hands-on exercise using Zoom, but we managed to do that with smaller groups of people.”
Workflow-centric or self-paced training
There are many engineers who prefer to do self-paced learning. “We have a budget, mostly used by our engineers, to attend conferences, courses, talks, or even engineering classes, and take advantage of an active university program at EPFL,” says Kandou’s Shokrollahi. “Our engineers view this as a reward for good work. The best way to learn is when engineers teach themselves, and today plenty of university-level courses are available online through YouTube or EdX and similar websites.”
Virtual learning is advancing. “With the increasing popularity of virtual classrooms and on-demand video-based training, accessibility is rapidly improving,” says Arm’s Rushton. “Training can now be delivered in shorter sessions, and live sessions recorded for access by those that can’t attend. Users also have the option to attend only those sessions relevant to them, driving efficiency. We continue to work to maximize the benefits these new approaches offer, and partner feedback is extremely positive.”
There are downsides, of course. “It is a lot of work to create self-paced, online training,” says Geday. “Plus, we still want to have that connection with those who are new to the standard because they are potential customers. We want explain and attract them to using the standard, and in the end, our software platform.”
There are several ways this can be done. “Several years ago, we created Open Virtual Platforms,” says Imperas’ Davidimann. “We created some videos, created a forum for Q&A, and we monitor this. It was a resource that people could come to and make use of. We would keep it up to date, answer their questions, but it was really a low contact way of trying to help people learn and understand.”
On-demand provides additional benefits. “Engineers are able to do online education when they are ready for it,” says Willoughby. “With traditional training, they would show up, go through something, and then go home and six months later it would be hard for them to remember anything. With online education, everything is at your fingertips. If you have a question, you can go back and look. The quality of online education has changed so much. Now we have videos, we have demonstrations. You can view something, you can watch a YouTube video and it will stick with you because you were learning something when you needed it. You will apply it as you needed it, not just somebody dumping information on you.”
In some cases, instructor-led and self-paced can work together. “Efficient onboarding for multiple tools and languages requires custom learning paths,” says Henson. “The custom learning path includes small nuggets of learning (videos, checklists, articles, etc.) organized around the engineer’s workflow. It reinforces the knowledge gained from the ILT course and guides the engineer along a route to success.”
And courses can be tailored. “As you develop the material, we include everything that somebody might want to use,” says Willoughby. “Then we tailor that to a customer’s needs. The very first step of the process is a meeting of the minds. We discuss with the engineers, the engineering managers, what part of that specific tool they’re using. With that we are tailoring and condensing the material. Everyone is busy, and with five days of training, it is possible that two days of that will be totally boring. What are they trying to get accomplished? We can augment the material so engineers get just what they need and hopefully not be bored to tears.”
That requires knowing the customer. “Knowing my audience is the most challenging part,” says Axiomise’s Darbari. “I have to determine what they know, what they would like to know, and how much time they are willing to spend in a training room. No one size fits all — certainly not for formal methods, which is considered a deeply mathematical topic and needs to be learned by engineers to stay productive if we want to build designs with no bug escapes.”
The open-source community is also bringing about change. “If you go to DAC, you can buy the proceedings and you can read the papers,” says Davidmann. “Public webinars provide online resources. If I want to learn how the privileged spec works in RISC-V, I can watch the architect present at one of the open forums, then I can watch someone else the next year. For example, Andes did a three-hour tutorial, which is open and free to everybody, on the vectors in RISC-V. Fantastic. The world changes, and people can do it on demand.”
Internal training
Companies often have experts within the company who know exactly what the engineers need to know. “Often, the engineer needs to learn the on-the-job (OTJ) processes used within a group,” says Henson. “Documenting team practices, workflows, and essential documents saves time and removes frustration. When I asked a client how he would measure the success of a team reference guide, he responded, ‘My phone will stop ringing.’ The guide facilitates the day-to-day knowledge for the young engineer, and it frees the veteran engineers to pursue new technical challenges.”
Verific builds that into the new hire process. “We often engage with students as summer trainees,” says Chakrabathy. “Initially, they are provided with LRMs of the SystemVerilog and/or VHDL language, and they play with simulators and in-house designs. They are then introduced to the concept of synthesizable designs. After six to eight months, they are tasked with writing applications using defined APIs while following a strict coding guideline. During the entire training process, all senior members of the technical staff are available for guidance and help with technical queries. When developing core software, senior developers are there to provide code reviews and lots of feedback. The whole lifecycle is continuous learning.”
VTool employs a similar process. “The training of junior engineers is organized through mentorship programs, during which time engineers have one-on-one support from mentors for practical labs and access to training material. Verification engineers should go through each step, gradually becoming more independent. By learning from verification leads and managers, and working with them side by side, engineers eventually reach the final step in the learning process, which is verification strategy and abstract thinking.”
Kandou makes learning part of the usual way of working. “We host minicourses where a senior engineer teaches other engineers about his or her specialty,” says Shokrollahi. Henson recommends that companies “designate a technical lead(s) or a group of mentors to oversee coaching for younger engineers. The technical lead may conduct informal mentoring, meet regularly with a small group, drive regular team meetings around new technical topics, or all of the above. Learning together inspires innovation and collaboration.”
Conclusion
While this is not the end of the story, all participants appear to have one notion in common, put into words by NI’s Henson. “A happy and engaged engineer is not interested in mundane, repetitive tasks or spending days searching for training and learning material. A thriving and engaged engineer is empowered daily to solve the next big challenge.”
Editor’s Note: Different approaches may be required for different types of education and the maturity of the subject matter. Part two of this article will focus on education that requires evangelization, the changes being brought by open communities and costs.

Continuous Education For Engineers

Rocky Road To Designing Chips In The Cloud

Verific Design Automation builds SystemVerilog, VHDL, and UPF Parser Platforms which enable its customers to develop advanced EDA products quickly and at low cost.

Verific

ALAMEDA , CA -- -LRB- Marketwired - Jul 14 , 2015 -RRB- - Verific , recognized as the leading supplier of hardware description language -LRB- HDL -RRB- parsers used throughout the semiconductor industry , today announced electronic design automation -LRB- EDA -RRB- newcomer Vtool has chosen Verific 's parsers for use with its functional verification platform .

Vtool Relies on Verific Design Automation’s Parser Platform to Drive Disruptive, Functional Verification Platform

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Compass Networks

RAD Data Communications

BigBand Networks

Siverge Networks

Celeno Communications

Microsemi

Vtool helps semiconductor companies to release their microchips faster and with fewer bugs. It is based in Tel Aviv, Israel.

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