EDA Graffiti

Yesterday at ICCAD, Jim Hogan and I led an discussion on the megatrends facing electronics and the implications going forward for EDA. Basically we took a leaf out of Scoop Nisker's book, who when he finished reading the news would sign off with "if you don't like the news go out and make some of your own." So we tried to.

Anyone whose being reading this blog regularly won't be surprised at the position that we took. I managed to find some interesting data from Morgan Stanley about how electronics is growing but it is also fragmenting. PCs ship in 100s of millions; cell-phones in billions (t...Read More

There was a reason I wrote about biometrics trecently. I have a new job as COO (and VP marketing) at Biogy, which is a biometrics company. Already I’ve become a biometrics bore. But that means I don’t really have time any more to be an EDA bore as well, not to mention that since I’ll be spending less time in the EDA milieu I won’t have anything interesting to say about it any more. Okay, I set myself up for comments about not having anything interesting to say anyway, in which case why are you here reading this? Biogy isn't fully funded so I'm not getting paid yet so I'm still interested in EDA consulting opportunities.

Anyway, time will tell how this all plays out. Maybe the gravitational attraction vortex of EDA will once again prove too much and I’ll be ba...Read More

I was at a biometrics conference in Florida the week before last. The state of the art is much more advanced than I realized in many areas.

For example, iris recognition can be done at a distance of a couple of meters. You just look at a screen for a second or two and the system can identify who you are and thus whether you are approved to enter, or whatever. In a self-contained unit, the unit itself can store 100,000 people. With a back-end database there can be millions or even hundreds of millions and identification still takes place in under 2 seconds. This is still what is called cooperative recognition, where the person being identified follows instructions, opens their eyes, takes off their glasses (although it has a pretty good recognition rate even if you d...Read More

When a company acquires another one, not just in EDA, there is often an internal group already doing something similar. For example, Intuit has just acquired mint.com and they already have a product, Quicken Online that competes in pretty much the same space. So how to merge the companies and the products?

Be ruthless and cull all the director-level management of the existing product (Quicken Online in this case). Put the managers of the acquired product in charge.

This is one thing that I learned at Cadence (you might have noticed that Cadence has done a fair number of acquisitions over the years, to say the least). The first thing to do is to lay off all the managers responsible for the internal competing product. They will inevitably try and sabotage the acquisition in more or l...Read More

I’ve been reading a very interesting book called “The Flaw of Averages” by Sam Savage. It looks at why using average data only produces the correct answers in very limited circumstances. The flaw of averages is that plans based on average assumptions are, on average, wrong.

For example, assume you are a manager deciding how big a factory (or fab) to build. Your marketing manager tells you he is certain that you’ll s...Read More

You’ve probably tried to explain to somebody the unbelievable scale of what it takes to design a modern chip with hundreds of millions or billions of transistors. But even we have difficulty with numbers when they get that large, like when we hear that there are 500 billion galaxies in the universe. Large numbers just don’t have that much impact. What’s another trillion dollars on the national debt? One way to make that one clearer is that it is roughly the amount taken in annually in income tax. So $1T of debt means one year of everyone in the country paying double their tax.

I was talking to an architect yesterday evening who was familiar with AutoCAD ($3K/seat!) for 3D design and she was asking how similar that was to IC design.

The usual ...Read More