Posts Tagged ‘DAC’
Sunday, June 7th, 2015
Omygosh, DAC’s here again! Has it already been a year? Apparently yes, and apparently once again the Design Automation Conference is going to be great. And how does one know? Because once again the DAC Executive Committee is great, lead in 2015 by the more-than-capable Anne Cirkel (Mentor’s own). Everything from academia to industry, from networking to hard-core learning (read, ‘Nerd Alert!)’, from food and libation to product announcements: DAC is always special.
So today is Sunday, which in the world of DAC is a lovely day full of workshops for those interested in the newest, and social opportunities for those interested in the noshing and nattering. Sunday is also lovely, because it’s a moment for astonishing realizations, and this year’s 52nd DAC Sunday is no different. Here are my 10 favs:
10 — Per Stanford’s Philip Wong speaking in Workshop 2, carbon nanotubes are smooth which helps with mobility-restricting surface roughness and band-gap issues. Also CNTs are no longer “a bowl of spaghetti” when manufactured. Now they’re 99% orderly and courteously aligned. (read, ‘Is asking about the other 1% a legitimate question?’)
9 — EDA’s own Karen Bartleson of SNPS fame, has not only just completed 2 years of distinguished service as President of IEEE’s worldwide Standards Organization, she’s now been nominated to serve as President of the Whole Enchilada; Bartleson’s running for President of the IEEE itself. In a word, Wow!
8 — Design Automation Summer School, for those who have not been keeping up (read, ‘me’), is no longer a week-long confab in July. These days Summer School is a one-day event on DAC Sunday. Still highly attended and full of pithy content for The Young & The Restless in EDA.
(more…)
Tags: Ajoy Bose, Alain Labat, Anne Cirkel, Ansys, Apple, Atrenta, Cadence, DA Summer School, DAC, Design Automation Conference, EDAC, edaForum, Elliot Garbus, Fiat Chrysler Automotive, Four Seasons, Harvest Management Partners, IEEE, Intel, Karen Bartleson, Klauss Busse, Mentor Automotive, Mentor Graphics, Patrick Groenveld, Philip Wong, Soha Hassoun, Synopsys, Wally Rhines, WWDC15
No Comments »
Thursday, March 5th, 2015
What if I were to tell you that I attended a conference where people were really excited to be there, where the exhibit hall was filled with a crush of people making their way from booth to booth, talking with exhibitors and exchanging business cards madly. A conference where the South of the exhibit hall was dominated by Synopsys, the East by Cadence, and the West by Mentor, and where at the happiest hour, libations and snacks flowed freely in a sub-set of the booths and the whole exhibit hall became even more animated.
What if I told you the technical portion of the conference included a variety of content — touching at times on autos, wearables, the IoT, IP, standards, and verification — excellent panel discussions, well-attended poster sessions, detailed tutorials, and a keynote from the CEO of the largest company in the industry delivered to a packed, SRO ballroom full of designers, engineers, and engineering managers.
Finally, what if I told you the highly capable staff of MP Associates was running the whole thing with their usual aplomb, attending to details as diverse as registration, sound systems, lunch tickets, speaker logistics, and awards presentations.
(more…)
Tags: Cadence, DAC, Design Automation Conference, DVCon, DVCon Europe, DVCon India, DVCon Silicon Valley, Mentor Graphics, MP Associates, Synopsys
2 Comments »
Thursday, August 14th, 2014
SIGDA is ACM’s Special Interest Group on Design Automation. They do lots of great stuff including organizing workshops and conferences, distributing and maintaining tool benchmarks, supporting the ACM Transactions on Design Automation, and perhaps most importantly, encouraging graduate students to pursue productive careers in EDA by way of the University Booth and PhD Forum at DAC.
This year’s SIGDA PhD Forum was held Tuesday evening, June 3rd, in San Francisco at DAC. Basically a large poster session, Room 104 in Moscone Center was packed from 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm with students, professors, and industry colleagues. It’s well-known that grad students come running whenever there’s free food, so given that a buffet dinner was part of the evening’s entertainment it’s not surprising there was a lively turnout for the event. However, grad students also love a good competition and the PhD Forum had that as well.
(more…)
Tags: DAC, DAC University Booth, Design Automation Conference, Gi-Joon Nam, Jeyavijayan Rajendran, Laleh Behjut, Richard Newton Young Fellows, Shiyan Hu, Shupeng Sun, SiGDA, SIGDA PhD Forum, Xin Li, Xiuyuan Bi, Zhuo Li
No Comments »
Thursday, July 17th, 2014
Once again EDAC’s Market Statistics Service has released quarterly results for the EDA and IP industries, and once again Mentor Graphics CEO Wally Rhines has taken time to debrief the press on the numbers. When we spoke by phone on July 15th, Rhines started with a qualitative eval of the financial situation in Q1_2014, and moved from there to answer several longer-range questions about autos and today’s troubled world.
“The first quarter of 2014 was good for the industry, but not great,” he said. “With overall growth of 4.6 percent, year over year, it was a good quarter with the highlight being logic design was up a solid 6.6 percent. Other than that, there was not a lot else [remarkable in EDA].”
“Steady, but not glamorous, for Q1?” I asked.
Rhines said, “Yes, steady as she goes in EDA. The IP business, however, was up strongly in Q1, driven up by results from the non-reporting companies, not members of EDAC. We collect public info from non-reporting IP companies such as ARM, Imagination Technologies, MIPS, Rambus [and Synopsys], and we can see overall that the IP business [exhibited] 10-percent growth, quarter over quarter, Q1_2013 to Q1_2014.”
He added, “The bigger trend [visible in] the current MSS report is that all of the world is showing strong [sales], except Japan which is very weak, down 19 percent in contrast to Asia Pacific, which is up 13.5 percent.
“You should also note that North America and Europe are quite strong, up 7 percent or more. Japan is well below those regions as well. Japan used to be a big part of the total [numbers for the industry], substantially larger than the Asia Pacific Region, but now the Pac Rim is twice the size of the Japanese market.”
(more…)
Tags: ARM, Cadence, DAC, EDAC, Egypt, El Salvador, Ford, Imagination Technologies, Infineon, Israel, James Buczkowski, MathWorks, Mentor Graphics, Microsoft, MIPS, MSS, Nokia, NXP, Pakistan, Rambus, Renesas Electronics, Synopsys, TI, Wally Rhines
2 Comments »
Thursday, May 29th, 2014
Like a phoenix rising from too-early reports of a reduced participation in life, the legendary Gary Smith has created a schedule of appearances at the 51st Design Automation Conference in San Francisco that would fell a man half his age. Every time you turn around at Moscone Center next week, or the Intercontinental Hotel before that, you’ll be face-to-face with events featuring the Guru Extraordinaire of EDA.
Sunday evening from 5:00 pm to 5:30 pm, Gary will yet again ring the opening bell at DAC, this year in Ballroom A of the Intercontinental Hotel across the street from Moscone. I’m putting good money on a bet that Gary will be on stage there in his best Tropical Whites, accompanied by slides, predictions, and previews of the Next Epoch in EDA and his Pavilion Panel the next day.
(more…)
Tags: 51st Design Automation Conference, Amit Gupta, Anirudh Devgan, ARM, Atrenta, Barnard Murphy, Bob Gardner, Cadence, CLK Design Automation, DAC, DAC 2014, Dead Drako, DeepChip, EDAC, Frank Schirrmeister, Gary Smith, Gloria Nichols, IC Manage, Isadore Katz, Jim Hogan, Joe Sawicki, John Cooley, Lori Kate Smith, Mentor Graphics, Moscone Center, Prince of Wales, Randy Smith, San Francisco Intercontinental Hotel, Solido Design Automation, Sonics, Vista Ventures
No Comments »
Thursday, May 22nd, 2014
Thanks to Nanette Collins, long-time EDA PR consul, we have a chance this week to catch up with Marie Pistilli. Marie co-founded DAC with her husband Pat in 1964.
Although Marie and Pat Pistilli have been fixtures at the conference they founded 51 years ago, they will not be in San Francisco this year. Pat’s recovering from surgery and the doctors have ordered him to stay home.
I can’t imagine not having the Pistilli’s at DAC, so I was very happy that Nanette was able to speak with Marie. They spoke by phone on May 19th.
(more…)
Tags: DAC, Design Automation Conference, Marie Pistilli, Marie R. Pistilli Award, MP Associates, Nanette Collins, Pat Pistilli
No Comments »
Friday, March 21st, 2014
It’s Friday afternoon and spring is busting out all over, so why would anyone want to sit on a conference call and talk about EDA? Well, if you were Ravi Subramanian, President and CEO of Berkeley Design Automation, you would. The company he leads has just been sold to Mentor Graphics and today’s his day to celebrate the feat with the press.
I spoke with Ravi for 20 minutes this afternoon and remembered straightaway why he is the real thing. Well spoken, fully informed, and completely disciplined in his presentation, still his extreme delight with the acquisition was in full view as he patiently fielded my questions.
(more…)
Tags: Analog FastSPICE, BDA, Berkeley Design Automation, Calibre, DAC, EDAC, Joe Sawicki, Mentor Graphics, Node2Node, Questa, Ravi Subramanian, Wally Rhines
1 Comment »
Thursday, February 6th, 2014
When it comes to talking about Forte Design, only one word comes to mind: Classy. There’s always been a consistency of messaging, spirit and optimism comprising the public face of Forte, and no small part of that has been the spirit and personable styling of the VP of Marketing & Sales, that ultimate ESL Evangelist, Brett Cline.
 Late yesterday afternoon, when I saw in an email blast from Semiconductor Engineering that Forte had been sold to Cadence, I was astonished [oh no, not another company sucked into the EDA Consolidation Vortex !?!], so I shot an email off to Brett and asked if he could make time for a phone call. True to form, he called me at 6 pm California time, which was 9 pm in snowy Massachusetts where Brett lives and works.
For the next 20 minutes, I listened to what has become the new normal in EDA: A great, albeit smallish company was made a “very fair offer” and although it may not have been the exit I myself would have predicted some years ago for Forte, Brett said that selling the company to a large EDA player is, today, the right and true decision for good leadership of good smallish companies in the industry.
All that being said, I noted an undercurrent of wistfulness in Brett’s voice. He wanted me to know how very much Forte Design has been run like a family company, that he felt about his co-workers at Forte as if they were family, and the fact that not all of them will be moving over to Cadence with the acquisition was making him profoundly sad last night. Profoundly sad.
Nonetheless, Brett and his co-execs at Forte will be moving to Cadence and the opportunities there, per Brett, are marvelous. He admires Cadence and is glad, given that Forte was going to be sold, that Cadence is where they’re landing. He admires the corporate culture at Cadence, thinks the management there respects the skills and technology being acquired with Forte, and thinks that not only is it a win for Cadence, but it’s a total win for Forte’s legions of loyal customers around the world.
(more…)
Tags: Bagpipers, Brett Cline, Cadence, DAC, Design Automation Conference, EDA, ESL, Forte Design Systems, John Cooley, John Sanguinetti, Lucio Lanza
1 Comment »
Thursday, January 9th, 2014
The New Year has arrived and with it a chance to reset the calendar for 2014. Following are only some of the conferences on the horizon. It’s interesting to look closely at the list to see which conferences are in direct scheduling conflict with each other.
* ASP-DAC 2014
Asia & South Pacific Design Automation Conference
Singapore – January 20-23
* DesignCon 2014
“Where the Chip Meets the Board”
Santa Clara – January 28-31
(more…)
Tags: ASP-DAC, CDNLive, DAC, DATE, DesignCon, DVCon, EmbeddedWorld, ISQED, Mobile World Congress, SPIE Photonics
No Comments »
Thursday, October 31st, 2013
[Editor’s Note: An abbreviated version of this article first appeared on-line on in July 2001, and again in May 2004 when Gary Smith was engaged to be married to Verisity’s Lori Kate Calise.]
**********************
Starting and ending with the Tao is pretty enigmatic stuff when, in the middle of the stream, you find a bass-toting, black-leather-clad blues musician fresh out of the Naval Academy living in a shack in the midst of Silicon Valley. That pretty much summarizes Gary Smith for those who know him. For those who don’t, to quote from an introduction to Gary I heard at a panel last year where he was acting as moderator: “If anyone in this room doesn’t know who Gary Smith is, they don’t belong in this room.”
For a number of years, Gary Smith has been the single most important prognosticator in EDA. The industry listens to Gary, at DAC and a thousand other venues over the course of the year. They bank on his annual numbers reporting on the health of the industry. They pin his EDA Landscape poster up on the wall to keep track of which companies are which in the here today/acquired tomorrow world of EDA. They take their business plans and nascent product ideas to him and hope for his blessings. They quote him. They court him. They keep him busy, and apparently he loves it – taking all of the adulation in stride with a smile and a nod, which is what you would expect from a guy who takes Eastern philosophies seriously and incorporates them into his mindset and lifestyle.
The rest of Gary’s story is as follows. However, if you believe as Gary does that less is more, you needn’t read on. Based on what you’ve read, you already know him.
(more…)
Tags: ARM, Avanti, Cadence, DAC, Daisy-Mentor-Valid, Dataquest, EDA, ES2, Fairchild, Full Disclosures, Gary Smith, GarySmithonEDA, IMI, Lori Kate Smith, LSI, Magma, Mentor Graphics, Monterey, National Electric, Plessy, Sequence, Signetics, Synopsys, Tao, Telmos, TI, U.S. Naval Academy
3 Comments »
|
