John Cooley,,
EDA consumer advocate & founder of ESNUG
Columnist: July 7, 1994
John Cooley,,
EDA consumer advocate & founder of ESNUG
The parallels between going to a Grateful Dead concert and attending the Design Automation Convention (DAC) are uncanny. Both events typically last for four or five days with a main floor show and lots of more interesting things happening off the floor. At night, you can partake in all sorts of fun in the parking lot if you're at the Dead show, or at an EDA vendor-sponsored dinner party if you're at DAC. Sign that unwritten, unspoken social contract not to tell anyone what you're about to see and do, and they'll let you into that tent/bus/van for extra special "fun" only hinted at on the Dead concert floor. Sign that lawyer-written, carefully worded nondisclosure agreement from EDA vendors and they'll let you into their demo suites to see their extra special upcoming software only hinted at on the DAC showroom floor.
Just like there are sets of songs that get the Dead audience all rocking and sets that put everyone to sleep, there are DAC panels that have everyone talking and others that people walk out on. And, just like there are lightweight, occasional recreational drug users next to hard-core junkies in the Dead concert, there are occasional PC-based schematic-capture FPGA designers next to hard-core Unix-workstation-pumping, Verilog/Synthesis/ATPG, 200-MHz, 350k-gate GaAs ASIC designers at DAC. Both worlds employ "pushers" (salesmen) to provide the controlled substances (or controlled software) to the users for a hefty cut of the price.
Both subcultures wear special attire (tie-dyes or suits), trade bootleg material (concert tapes or EDA benchmarks), and converse in special words that have meaning only to members of that particular subculture ("electric Kool Aid," "ganja," "tripping" vs "ESDA," "PLI," and "regressions"). Just as there are unique personalities known in the Dead world (Timothy Leary, Bill Graham, Jack Kerouac, Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey, and Hunter S Thompson), unique personalities also exist in the DAC world (Aart De Geus, Ron Collett, Bill Fuchs, Richard Goering, John Sanguinetti, and Joe Costello). But enough cultural anthropology, on with the awards!
WORST OVERALL SURPRISE AT DAC: An awful lot of attendees at DAC were caught off guard when the DAC exhibit hall closed a day early. Yes, technically it was buried in the schedule, but who reads schedules until the day of the event? (As a consequence, on Thursday, I found myself in a 21/2-hour lunch/interrogation about industry trends with Ron Collett, a market researcher.) Also, DACnet had technical problems the first day that made it very difficult to log in and use. This meant many people were hard to contact because they blew off retrying the healthy DACnet on subsequent days. (A good DACnet note: they added telnet and ftp capability this year—great!)
MOST ANXIOUS EDA VENDOR(S): Virtually all of the non-Cadence- and non-ViewLogic-affiliated Verilog vendors were acting like debutantes at their first ball. Because Synopsys tipped its hand in the Verilog/VHDL wars in its failed bid for Chronologic, and Mentor is openly stating it needs a Verilog solution, the remaining independent Verilog vendors are terrified at the prospect of not being asked to dance.
WHAT EDA USERS THOUGHT WAS HOT: Because submicron and low-power design seems to be of interest to quite a few people these days, one of the hottest talked-about companies at DAC this year was Epic Design Technology. Its PathMill is an advanced static analysis tool, PowerMill is the leading dynamic power analysis tool, and TimeMill is the Spice-like accelerated analysis tool—all for submicron design.
The second hot topic was Chrysalis' Design Insight and Design Verifyer, two of the first commercial tools to take the formal verification approach to check for your design flaws. Because these products take a mathematical approach, Chrysalis claims that formal verification beats dynamic simulations by orders of magnitude in overnight regressions.
The third topic people were discussing was Synopsys' Behavioral Compiler, a tool that can take algorithmically written Verilog or VHDL and convert it to gates. Unlike regular synthesis that pretty much translates from the original structure in the source HDL, Behavioral Compiler literally juggles around things like registers, multiplexers, and adders to best fit the designer's scheduling goals.
The Redwood/Comdisco demo and the recent purchase of Redwood by Cadence were also on people's minds. (The big question is how many of the original Redwood R&D engineers are going to stick around?) Cadence's Verilog and VHDL co-simulation products were also hot. (Mix and match Verilog/VHDL source/libraries at will!)
ArcSys is targeting Cadence in the place and route business, and Integrated Silicon Systems (ISS) also seems to be attacking Cadence on the mask-verification front (Dracula). Everyone goes after the big company.
BEST DAC PANEL: Tie between the EE Times/DEC/ViewLogic-sponsored DAC Forum and the DAC-sponsored Four CEO panel. What people liked about the DAC Forum was that they could "vote" electronically for what a particular panelist was saying at the moment, making it very audience interactive in a grand way. (Only users—no vendors—were given the handheld voting machines.) What the audience liked about the Four CEO Panel was a rare look at how these industry bigwigs see the world.
WORST DAC PANEL: The EE Times Benchmarking Summit. Lots of people on the panel and in the audience came prepared to discuss issues like the Actel Proposal, how Prep works, benchmarking clauses in nondisclosure agreements, and benchmarkers who blackmail EDA vendors. Instead, the moderator (a non-EDA-knowledgeable person) had everyone spend 2 hours partaking in a UN conflict-resolution exercise where we had to argue the opposing side's point of view. (Someone would say something and the moderator would then have everyone determine, "What should I write in the 'ASSUMPTION' column and in the 'WANTS' column on that statement?") Every time an interesting exchange started, the moderator would actively step in and stop it. As a result, all we could do was lightly touch some of the politics of benchmarking.
BEST AFTER-HOURS PARTY: Quickturn Emulation's Tuesday night bash. The company had a sit-down dinner after which the Temptations performed. Although it had appeared that ViewLogic was going to win this award with a ferry ride to a sit-down dinner on Harbor Island and comedian (everyone was schmoozing like crazy to get tickets before this event), the comedian turned out to be a flop in many people's opinion. (He was more caustic than funny: Attendees were stuck laughing nervously to be polite.) It was rumored that LSI gave 100 of its "most favored customers" a regatta in San Diego bay with six people per sailboat. It sounded like fun, but was too limited a party to qualify for an award.
BEST USE OF DAC TERRAIN FOR A PARTY: Synopsys' wild night at the zoo. The moment you got off the bus, there was a table full of beers with helpers saying "Take two! The tour's 45 minutes," as they shooed you onto the double-decker open-air tour bus to go around the zoo. (Harvey Jones, Synopsys' chairman, who was sitting two seats behind me, commented on how excited I was when we saw the sheep exhibits.) Stumbling off the bus, we got more beer and great predinner munchies at a party where we could pet six different animals. Then we had a choice of a swordfish or chicken dinner in an open-air Gilligan's Island setting. Afterwards, all 300 of us were given Irish coffee as we walked to the firedrummer's performance. (In contrast, Collett reports that Cadence also had a dinner at the San Diego Zoo for about 65 people with no tour and three petting animals brought in after dinner. Mentor did something of similar ilk and size at the San Diego Aquarium.)
BEST RARE DAC FREEBIE: Summit Design's denim jackets. They were well made with a small, tasteful "Summit" patch on the left shoulder. Total number given away: 175 (120 went to its Pacific Rim distributor, 25 on the showroom floor, and 30 for schmoozers).
BEST COMMON DAC FREEBIE: The Official DAC gym bag. It's sturdy, useful and has a tasteful royal purple, teal, and black color scheme. (One user wondered if IBM was "in" on the bag's color scheme because all the IBM shirts matched it exactly.) Runners Up: a tie between the ViewLogic soccer ball and the Epic Design Technology sports radio. (ViewLogic consciously chooses a high-quality freebie that's a pain to carry back on the plane so everyone can see you carrying it in the airport. They did it last year with the baseball bat and this year with the soccer ball. The message I get with this type of freebie is "we're hard to work with.") The Epic Design Technology sports radio is great (batteries included!) but nowhere near the quality of a Sony.
MOST UNEXPECTED DAC FREEBIE: Quad Design's hammers. (Racal-Redac and Analogy gave out tape measures. Are their marketing managers a little confused about what the hardware-design industry is?) Runner Up: Aptyx's coconuts. Huh?
MOST CONTENT-FREE VENDOR PRESENTATION: Synopsys' talk on submicron design. I'm told it was 40 minutes and only two things were said: design is headed toward the submicron level, and there's going to be more transistors on chips in the future. A close second was Cadence's re-engineering talk where the company spent 20 minutes vaguely discussing customer successes and stating that, "Cadence is here to help with your re-engineering needs."
BIGGEST VENDOR LIE: Quite a few people told me about going through the ViewLogic Soccer Ball Quest. They had to sit through a "VHDL is better than Verilog" talk by a ViewLogic salesman. The salesman confidently said that "Vital is just around the corner! VHDL handles concurrent processes better!" These statements surprised the experienced simulation users because they've always described Verilog as "just like C but with wires, registers, and constructs to handle concurrent processes." Plus, it took five years to get fully debugged Verilog libraries from ASIC vendors—why should Vital be different? Ready for a discussion on these topics, they asked the salesman to explain his reasoning. The salesman replied, "Well, that's what I've been told."
WHAT DO YOU MEAN "WHAT'S NEW?": A long-time customer asked people in the Mentor booth: "What do you have new this year?" They were unable to answer with anything other than a simple design manager tool.
MOST PERSONALLY GRATIFYING DAC PANEL: The HDL Summit. Ron Collett moderated six panelists ranging from Verilog bigots to people using both to VHDL bigots. As usual, Collett tried to conclude the panel with his spin that VHDL was where everyone was going, etc. Just to annoy him, I pointed out how, years ago, a researcher at Dataquest had made a now-embarrassing prediction that VHDL users would outnumber Verilog in early '92—a prediction that turned out to be greatly exaggerated. That Dataquest research-er was Ron Collett.
