Congratulations Xilinx, Cadence and Berkeley

Hey folks, we at EDN held our big Innovation award ceremony last night. I want to congratulate all the finalists as well as the winners but I also want to thank you folks for voting.

As you’ve probably read, Xilinx’s Virtex-5 design team took home the top honor, winning “Innovator of the year.” The team also took home the trophy in the “Digital ICs, programmable logic, and memory” category.

Also, congratulations to Berkeley Design Automation for winning the award for best front-end IC design tool and Cadence Design Systems for winning the award for best backend IC design tool.

I also want to congratulate and thank the rest of the finalists in the EDA categories for participating. The other finalists in the two EDA categories were BlazeDFM, Clear Shape, Magma Design, Novas Software and Rio Design. All fielded very strong, innovative tools in 2006, and this year, the awards could have gone to any of them.

This year’s batch of new tools is looking promising already and the pre-DAC deluge of new product releases hasn’t even started yet. You, the reader, can be even more involved in the selection process by letting me know if any of the tools released between November of last year and November of this year should be nominated for next year’s award. Thanks again for participating.