Posts Tagged ‘EDAC’
Thursday, September 7th, 2017
Talking to Dean Drako is probably a little like talking to Elon Musk: Both men have their fingers in multiple pies. In Drako’s case, and apropos to semiconductor design, one pie includes the IP and EDA industries.
Dean Drako founded IC Manage in 2003, a company whose products are targeted at IC designers who need help coordinating their efforts, integrating third-party IP into their design equation, and accelerating design. Interestingly, at the same time Drako was founding IC Manage, he was also founding Barracuda Networks, and ran both companies simultaneously for a number of years.
Today 14 years later, Drako still serves as President and CEO of IC Manage, but is ‘only’ on the board of Barracuda. Lest you think his plate is not full enough, however, he’s also currently President and CEO of Eagle Eye Networks.
Prior to our phone call last week, I researched Drako on Wikipedia: “Drako has written a number of articles on Open Source, Big Data, and SoC design. He is a frequently invited speaker on the topic of entrepreneurship [and] is a holder of 27 patents, including patents in network security, network protocols, digital circuits, software, biochemical processes, and sporting equipment.”
Yeah, pretty much just like talking to Elon Musk.
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Tags: Apple, Barracuda Networks, Cadence, Dassault, Dean Drako, Design Acceleration, Drako Motors, Eagle Eye Networks, EDAC, ESD Alliance, IC Manage, MatrixOne, NVIDIA, Shiv Sikand, Synchronicity
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Thursday, February 9th, 2017
This week, the ESD Alliance announced that Sonics CEO Grant Pierce has been elected chair of the organization’s Board of Directors. His election is unique in several ways: Pierce is the first CEO of an IP company to lead the Alliance; he replaces two co-chairs, Cadence CEO Lip-Bu Tan and PDF Solutions, John Kibarian; and he is only the second CEO of a non-publicly traded company to serve as Board Chair, the other being Jasper CEO Kathryn Kranen who took the reins in 2012.
When Pierce and I spoke by phone on Tuesday about his election, he noted the unique circumstances of his new leadership role: “When I joined the board several years ago, it was with the intention to add a new point of view to what was then the EDA Consortium, to help the organization reflect the emerging reality of what was happening in the marketplace with respect to IP companies.
“In some ways, the IP companies consider themselves to be a necessary evil. Every chip developed today involves some sort of third-party IP, so having a place on the Board of the ESD Alliance is essential.”
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Tags: Aart de Geus, Amit Gupta, ARM, Bob Smith, Cadence, Cadence Design Systems, Dean Drako, EDA Consortium, EDAC, ESD Alliance, ESDA, IC Manage, John Kibarian, Lanza techVentures, Lip-Bu Tan, Lucio Lanza, Mentor Graphics, PDF Solutions, Simon Segars, Solido Design Automation, Sonics, Synopsys, Wally Rhines
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Thursday, May 19th, 2016
It’s a poorly kept secret that Bob Smith was brought in as Executive Director of EDAC last year to shake things up, to breathe new life into the sails of a somewhat becalmed organization. Well, in the category of be careful what you ask for, here’s how things have gone so far:
New companies have joined the consortium, the newest member of the Board of Directors is not a CEO, a plethora of monthly panels have engaged the industry in thought-provoking discussions about innovation vis-à-vis commercial enterprise, a marketing deal has been struck with Semico, and the whole friggin’ organization has been re-branded as the ESD Alliance to reflect an intent to get more IP guys, more Embedded guys, and more Yet-to-be-identified guys into the alliance than just the traditional anchor tenants from EDA.
But none of this comes close to the potential impact of the latest disruptive idea that ESDA is proposing: The founding of a brand new working group that could very well redefine the whole semiconductor supply chain: The ESD Alliance System Scaling Working Group.
Astonishing.
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Tags: Accellera, Bob Smith, EDAC, ESD Alliance, GSA, Herb Reiter, IEEE, Sematech, Semi, Semico, Si2, System Scaling Working Group
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Thursday, March 24th, 2016
Luckily, there wasn’t time this week to speak by phone with Mentor Graphics CEO Wally Rhines. After all, who wants to hear bad news in person: EDA has turned south.
Here’s the quote from Rhines included in EDAC’s press release discussing their Market Statistics Service report for Q4_2015:
“After 23 consecutive quarters of growth, the EDA Industry revenues declined slightly in the fourth quarter, compared to a particularly strong Q4 2014. However, industry revenue increased 5 percent for calendar 2015 compared to 2014, and the semiconductor IP and services categories increased in Q4. Geographically, the Asia Pacific region continues to grow, while other regions saw modest declines this quarter.”
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Tags: EDAC, EDAC Market Statistics Service, Simon Segars, Wally Rhines
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Wednesday, March 9th, 2016
EDAC has decided to change its name. At last. What the new name will be, most do not know, but you can find out over some food and a glass of wine or beer on Wednesday evening, March 30th, at the Consortium’s headquarters on Zanker Road in San Jose.
Lots of people have been pointing out for a long time that membership in the EDA Consortium includes some of the biggest names in IP, not to mention embedded software, so not reflecting that reality in the organization’s name is pretty nonsensical. In fact, two recent blogs here on EDACafe specifically address the issue.
The first one is titled: “Answer’s nope: Should EDA Consortium become IP Consortium?” [September 30, 2015].
In this blog, I asked Mentor Graphics CEO Wally Rhines: “Aren’t the IP companies on the verge of overshadowing the size and impact of the EDA companies in the EDA Consortium. So much so, it seems like it’s time to change the name to the IP Consortium.”
Rhines responded, “It will never be the case that it’s all EDA or all IP. In fact, IP revenue is only one-third the size of the market tracked by MSS today. The other two-thirds is traditional EDA.
“Even ARM — although their market cap is $20 billion — their revenue is just about the same as Mentor’s. The EDA industry is a long way from being dominated by the IP industry, plus we’re in a very prosperous period in EDA. We’ve got 22 nanometers, 14, 10, 7 all working at the same time, so we’re meeting customer demands at all of these nodes.”
Last September, Dr. Rhines appeared distinctly underwhelmed by the argument that it’s time to change the Consortium’s name.
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Tags: EDA Consortium, EDAC, Simon Davidmann, Wally Rhines
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Thursday, January 7th, 2016
If you ask Wally Rhines, CEO at Mentor Graphics, about concerns that there has been too little disruptive change and, therefore, too little high-profile investment in the EDA industry over the last several years, he says: “It true that startups always like to see a spike up in growth.
“However, the biggest companies would like to see something closer to steady growth. Volatility is not as good for the bigger companies as it is for the smaller companies.”
If you ask: “But how viable is a high-tech industry when there’s no increase expected in VC funding for the foreseeable future?”
Rhines replies: “Yes, it’s true. VC funding in EDA has declined over the last 10 years, with the money often going instead into social networking. There is still ongoing investment today in EDA, however, but it’s angel funding, not VC funding.”
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Tags: EDAC, Mentor Graphics, Wally Rhines
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Thursday, October 29th, 2015
It’s the gospel truth that if you want to know what went down this evening at the first event in EDAC’s newly launched legal series, you can just wait a sec and see the video when it’s posted to the consortium’s website. But then, as they say, why let the truth get in the way of a good story.
I sat in the back of the room at 3801 Zanker Road in San Jose, imbibing a bit of La Crema Chardonnay and enjoying way too much shrimp and cocktail sauce. Best place if you want to relax, enjoy the evening, and count heads. There were 75 in the room, by the way, all there to enjoy the 2-hour gab fest. And gab fest it was.
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Tags: EDAC, Innovation, Patent Trolls
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Thursday, October 8th, 2015
October 20th is just around the corner, so please click here to register for the 2015 Silicon Valley IP Users Conference. It’s hard to see anything about this event not to like: wine, excellent speakers, conversations very specific to the technology and business of IP, and did we mention wine? It’s being held at the Testarossa Winery in Los Gatos.
Of course, it’s hats off to IPextreme’s Constellations consortium for hosting the day-long event, plus special kudos to EDAC for an innovative outlook allowing that consortium to sponsor the 4 pm end-of-day networking reception even though not a single EDA company is on the speaker list. But what’s especially impressive about the October 20th event is the suggestion that various stake-holders in the IP industry can come together in this manner.
IP is still having to fight for full representation at DAC and even to a certain extent within EDAC, despite the ARM CEO being on the Board of Directors, so an enthusiastic conference and rounds of conversation arranged for and by the IP industry is pretty damn cool stuff.
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Tags: 2015 Silicon Valley IP Users Conference, Constellation IP consortium, EDAC, IPextreme
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Thursday, November 6th, 2014
It was impossible not to be in a celebratory mood if you attended the exuberant Kaufman Award dinner at the San Jose Marriott on Tuesday, November 4th, honoring this year’s nominee, Dr. Lucio Lanza. Next door to the Kaufman ballroom, where at least 250 well-dressed pillars of the EDA industry were eating, drinking, and reconnecting with old friends, was another ballroom where hundreds and hundreds more were celebrating early election results for one of the two mayoral candidates for San Jose, elections having been held that day. Combining the energies emanating from the two ballrooms, the whole hotel was really rocking.
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Tags: CEDA, EDAC, Lucio Lanza, Phil Kaufman Award, San Jose Marriott Hotel
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Thursday, August 7th, 2014
This blog started out as a mini-research project: How many members of EDAC are exhibiting at ARM TechCon 2014? I went into the project with the pre-conceived notion that ARM throws such a large shadow across the world of IP and EDA that everybody in EDAC would be exhibiting at ARM.
What I discovered, however, is something completely different. In examining the lists, I found that there are 4 overlapping circles – think Venn Diagram – that comprise the totality of a world made up of ARM TechCon exhibitors and EDAC members.
Here are the lists of EDAC members who are exhibiting versus those who are not:
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Tags: ARM TechCon 2014, EDA, EDAC, IP Industry, Levy Stadium
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