Memories…A few notable articles from the "ISD magazine" archives

One of the great things about the web is that you can access some great old articles; of course the trouble is there is so much stuff on the web a lot of it gets lost in the googleplex of stuff people post.

So as I reach my 12 year anniversary of covering EDA, I was thinking of some of the great stories I edited at my first professional gig in electronics at now defunct Integrated System Design magazine. It was 1995, I was fresh out of college and this was my first job. At the time ISD’s staff had only three editors, Tets Maniwa, Jonah McCloud and I. Tets joined the staff three months before me straight out of an analog IC design company and I was fresh out of college, we managed pretty well to put the book together on a monthly basis and we put together some memorable issues–the magazine grew under that staff. I ended up leaving ISD in 1997 to work for EE Times. ISD a few years later bought by Miller Freeman which a year later purchased CMP Media, publisher of EE Times. ISD eventually was shut down but its archives lived on under an EETimes URL.

One I think you should check out because it is still useful today but also has an interesting history is “Comparing Verilog to VHDL Syntactically and Semantically: The way to a designer's heart is through HDL” by Johan Sandstrom.

It was back in the days of Verilog vs. VHDL and when design companies started mixing the two languages. Johan, who had his own design house at the time, penned this great piece where he created a bi-directional VHDL to Verilog and Verilog to VHDL table.

That issue flew off the shelves largely because of the article. What’s interesting is that a few months later John Cooley ran the now infamous Great ESDA shootout, which challenged a bunch of design teams and vendors to come up with a design that best met some criteria Cooley concocted. The long of the short of it was, some ISD reader had the hard copy of this issue in hand and using the translation table beat several other competitors, one group of which was Mentor Graphics own apps engineers who were using Mentor’s new ESDA tool (System Architect). (I think it’s no longer on the market). Cooley then wrote about the shootout, which wasn’t so well received by Mentor.

The next really cool article was this piece by Luke Chang. I was sitting at my desk one day and Luke calls me out of the blue and says, “Hey, I use Quad Design’s Motive tool (which at the time was the de facto standard static timing tool) and the manual really sucks, but I’ve figured out ways to get the tool to do some pretty neat stuff. Would you like me to write an article about it?” I, of course, said, “sure” and Luke and I went back and forth on the article for a month and half. It is one of the coolest articles I’ve edited. ISD had to print additional copies of the issue because it was that popular. Quad was eventually acquired by Synopsys and the tool was replaced by Primetime. Not sure if there are any die hard Motive users out there but if there are check it out.

And finally, here’s an article I found very memorable, not necessarily because of its content but because it perpetuated a brush with death experience. It was an article John Cooley wrote, called “Cadence: the good, the bad and the ugly,” on Cadence’s big jump into design services. I was a young editor and was trying to keep it real so when I edited Cooley’s piece, one of the Cadence users used a variation of the phrase Spectrum Services, that, well rymed with Spectrum but starts with an “R” instead of “Sp.” At any rate, our publisher and ultimately my boss’ boss, a guy named Jim Uhl, who was a retired Navy Seal, and at the time looked like he still was actively one, barged into my office with what I’ll describe as an “I’m going to kill you, I just have to figure out the cruelest way to do it” look on his face. He started screaming that he just got off the phone with then Cadence CEO Joe Costello and that Costello was appalled that we would print something like that. I told Jim that I was simply keeping it real and felt the phrase truly captured the threat a lot of Cadence customers felt by Cadence’s very controversial move into services at the time. I then also showed him how we had several “thata boy” responses from our readership…he quickly changed his attitude and said something like, “wow, that’s great—I can probably sell that.” I lived to see another day…and it was an on-the-job lesson learned. Incidentally it was soon afterwards that Cadence changed the name of its design services branch.