It was the middle of the morning on a school day in California when the President was shot in November 1963. The principal came over the PA system and announced the President was injured in Dallas and was in surgery. She asked all teachers to suspend classroom activities and wait for further news.

In my class, our teacher told us to take something out to read and sat down at his desk at the front of the room. After a very long time, the principal came back on the PA. The President had died. She asked teachers to help their students understand what had happened.

Our teacher sat very still at his desk for a long time and then stood up. He started to speak, but stopped. He took off his glasses with his left hand and covered his eyes with his right. For at least 10 minutes he stood like that, still and silent with his eyes covered.

Recently, I spent a few enjoyable days in Austin at the Design Automation Conference, June 6-9, attending sessions, checking out verification vendors exhibiting on the show floor and catching up with long-time friends and colleagues. Evenings were filled with dinner events and more catching up.

The event was opened Monday morning by Chuck J. Alpert, general chair of the 53rd DAC, who delivered a motivational welcome supported with a few statistics. The following summarizes the paper and poster submissions and the acceptance rate, including the territorial breakdown.

Attendance somewhat exceeded 6,000 visitors, slightly more than the last event in Austin in 2013. But rather exceptional was a 45% increase in technical conference attendees.

If the title of  today’s post sounds familiar, that’s not surprising. The most popular post in the history of The Breker Trekker blog, by a significant margin, was “An EDA Industry of Startups, Behemoths, Corner Stores, and Zombies?” published almost three years ago. I thought that it would be fun to revisit this topic in light of the changes in the EDA industry over the past three years. Have these changes fundamentally altered our world? Please read on to see.

I’ll begin, as I did in the original post, by noting that the EDA industry used to be divided into only three categories: major leaguers, minor leaguers, and startups. Nearly all EDA startups disappeared after three or four years, with three possible endgames: acquisition, initial public offering (IPO), or bankruptcy. The major leaguers, at one time or another, included Daisy, Mentor, Valid, Cadence, Synopsys, and Avant.