Doing What We Can in Challenging Times
Most of us have faced difficulties in our personal and professional lives, and have worked our way through them. But few of us have experience dealing with a challenge as broad and disruptive as the COVID-19 global pandemic. By now, many people know friends and family members who have been sickened or even struck down by this disease. The economic toll is staggering, and recovery will take considerable time. Even with all the coping mechanisms we have developed through dealing with past challenges in our lives, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.
I think that the best way to handle the stress and uncertainty is to do whatever we can to help our families and community, and those everywhere suffering directly or indirectly from the virus. As an example, a diverse group of companies and institutions recently took an innovative step to establish the Open COVID Pledge. This initiative offers intellectual property (IP) free of charge for the purpose of diagnosing, preventing, containing, and treating COVID-19.
The result is that developers of solutions to fight the pandemic don’t have to worry about cost or restrictions of IP owned by those who have taken the pledge. We at Agnisys loved this idea, so we have joined the effort. Our tools and IP are used to design and verify many types of semiconductor devices, including those used in medical applications. We want to encourage the development of medical devices to fight this terrible virus.
Specifically, we will provide free tools to any engineers involved in the development of medical devices to diagnose, contain, treat, or prevent the disease. Many of our tools generate design and verification IP used at various stages in chip development. The Open COVID License OCL-P 1.1 ensures that we are also providing all patents related to our IP free of charge for use in relevant projects.
As I mentioned in a recent blog post, we are offering an extensive series of webinars on a broad range of design and verification topics. With many engineers currently working from home, including those developing medical products, webinars offer a convenient and effective way to learn about key industry challenges and solutions. All the webinars are being recorded and are available after the live events. A complete list and registration instructions are available here at your convenience.
Beyond the webinars, we are doing everything that we can to support our users during these challenging times. The Agnisys team is also working from home, but we are fully productive and fully engaged. We are fortunate to be in an industry where we and our users can remain employed and do our jobs remotely. I am finding that there is a real spirit of “we are in this together” as we navigate through this changed world.
Finally, it’s important to do what we can to take care of our own physical and mental health. We need to strengthen our immune systems, ultimately our best hope against this disease. Personally, I am eating healthy food and getting as much sunshine (Vitamin D) as I can. There are a few other things I have added to my regular regimen, and I offer them in the hope that they will be useful for you as well:
- Medcram : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFRwnhfWXxo
- Hydrotherapy : https://www.hydro4covid.com/
- Win Hof : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzCaZQqAs9I
- Pranayam : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1Jd1z9Z_zc (Hindi only)
Agnisys has taken a pledge to provide everything we have—our patents, our software, our expertise, our support—for the eradication of this virus. We sincerely hope that some good souls can do something useful with these for humanity. Please do what you can as well: provide support for those suffering, donate to feed the hungry of the world, and take care of your own health.
