EDA Graffiti
Presentations books
A few days ago I was asked by a friend what books I would recommend on putting together presentations. There are lots out there and I don’t claim to have looked at all of them. But here are five that I think are especially good. The first book isn’t actually about presentations specifically but is one aspect of a few slides in some presentations. It is Edward Tufte’s book ...... Read More
Comments (0)EDAC's origins
Because I do some consulting for Oasys, I crossed paths with Rick Carlson who is an investor and advisor to them. I hadn’t realized that he was one of the people responsible for getting EDAC going. In fact, when EDAC started it wasn’t for the whole industry, it was for the smaller EDA companies and actually was called IDAC, for Independent Design Automation Consortium (I’m not ...... Read More
Comments (2)Tekton
I met with Bob Smith, VP of product marketing for Magma, earlier this week, over a glass of wine and a lunch in a nice French bistro, to talk about the new product that they are introducing today. They are introducing a completely new from-the-ground-up timing engine called Tekton. I happen to know that Tekton is also typeface (font) designed by David Siegel, one of the first designers to tak ...... Read More
Comments (2)Altium: EDA Oz-style
One theme of this blog is that IC EDA is increasingly inspecting its own navel while the bulk of design is going on in the PCB and FPGA worlds (not to mention software). One company that is focused on this market is Altium. They used to be called Protel and were famous for a couple of things. Firstly, they were Australian. And secondly they sold their software at a very low price, partially becaus ...... Read More
Comments (24)EDAC forecast panel
The annual EDAC CEO forecast meeting was last week. For a change, Synopsys had just reported their results earlier and so were not in their quiet period. Unfortunately, Wally had just entered his quiet period so, as he put it, he was only allowed to talk about the past. First up was Lip-Bu of Cadence, who started out by wearing his venture-capitalist hat. He said that VCs were not finding any semi ...... Read More
Comments (1)Guest blog: Sandeep Srinivasan
This is the second part of a piece by Sandeep Srinivasan. The first part is here. This follows on from my piece yesterday and sets up a different view from mine (you’ll have to wait until next Tuesday, or read lots of this blog, to find out my opinion). Be at the San Jose Doubletree at 6.30 on February 23rd in the Oak ballroom.EDA and the 50 picosecond problem, part 2 There has been a ...... Read More
Comments (0)So you want to start an EDA company?
As I have said repeatedly, the old model for innovation in EDA has died. The old model was largely that venture capitalists would fund teams of engineers, they would produce products to solve some problem that was looming on the horizon, one or two of them would turn out to be the market leaders, the big EDA companies would buy them for significant money and everyone was happy. This model is brok ...... Read More
Comments (3)CoWare
It must be something in the water in silicon valley right now. But no sooner have I written about VaST and Virtutech being acquired then Synopsys acquires CoWare as well. Since I never worked there, I don’t have any sort of inside track on what is going on. CoWare started life many years ago with a product called n2c, which stood for napkin to C, an attempt at turning high level system idea ...... Read More
Comments (5)Virtutech
I’d heard rumors that Intel was acquiring Virtutech and I presumed that the purpose was to put it together with Wind River that they acquired last year. I mentioned this in my post about VaST earlier this week but I wasn’t expecting to come back quite so soon to write about Virtutech. Anyway, it is now official, Intel is indeed acquiring Virtutech. The price hasn’t been disclo ...... Read More
Comments (1)VaST
Finally it is public knowledge that Synopsys has acquired VaST Systems Technology. I was VP marketing there for a bit over a year back when Graham was still CEO. Since I exercised my options when I left, I’ve been inundated with paperwork on the merger, although the acquiring company name was redacted everywhere it appeared (although everyone knew who it was). I don’t suppose I ...... Read More
Comments (3)Ticonderoga
When I was at Cadence, one of my jobs was to be the technical interface to investors and analysts. The finance organization, with its investor relations department, could handle all the numbers but if anyone wanted to talk about technology then I was the person that got called in. I knew enough about the technology across the whole product line to be credible, and I was house-trained in what I cou ...... Read More
Comments (0)Consumer Electronics Show
At the start of January I went to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. It is quite unlike any trade-show I’ve ever been to before. It fills all the halls of the Las Vegas convention center plus a hotel or two. There were 130,000 people attending. For comparison, AT&T park has a capacity of 41,000 so it is about 3 times as large. And if you think the traffic is bad after a b ...... Read More
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