Posts Tagged ‘DAC’
Wednesday, October 16th, 2013
Several years ago, after a phone briefing about a new product launch, I received a call back from the PR counsel who had organized the meeting. She asked me if I had all the info I needed regarding the product and the company. I said yes, and offered a minor apology for asking too many pointed questions of the marketing manager during the interview.
She said, “Oh, that’s okay. Talking to you is like talking to Aart de Geus. It’s clear you both think you’re the smartest guy in the room.”
That comment has come to mind multiple times since then, for two reasons. One, you never really know what impression you leave with people until it comes out at some capricious moment. And two, Aart de Geus isn’t the smartest guy in the room, just because he thinks so. He’s the smartest guy in the room, because he really is the smartest guy in the room.
That’s particularly applicable today with the EDAC event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the EDA industry about to commence this evening in Silicon Valley. Per the Consortium, a plethora of industry luminaries will be in attendance. Per this writer, none will be more luminary than Dr. de Geus. If you’re reading this, you’re probably pretty well versed in both the history of EDA and the history of Aart de Geus. Nonetheless, here’s the latter in a nutshell.
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Tags: Aart de Geus, Computer History Museum, DAC, Davos, Deirdre Hanford, EDA Consortium, Electronic Design Automation, EPFL, FSA, GE, Harris Semiconductor, Harvey Jones, IEEE, Karen Bartleson, Legally Blue, Ron Rohrer, SMU, Synopsys, Synopsys Silicon Valley Science and Technology Championship
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Thursday, June 6th, 2013
One would think if DAC were to be located in Austin, it would be natural to connect the dots between the kind of folk who come to the conference and the cowboy of yesteryear – that iconic, laconic, sole warrior and minimalist who rides the open range with few possessions and even fewer words, but carries big ideals of freedom and individual liberties in his saddle bag, as well as a respect for hearth and home – although he’s rarely there – and the ability to defend the weak and helpless from organized power brokers who put the interests of the few above the needs of the many.
Nope, those aren’t the folks who come to DAC. Nope, the designers aren’t cowboys, and neither are the CAD managers, nor the CAD tool vendors, nor the IP vendors, nor the system houses, nor the fab guys, nor the PR folks or the press, and definitely not the academics. Nope, not cowboys.
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Tags: Austin, Cowboys, DAC, Design Automation Conference, Sun Tzu, Texas, The Art of War, Wild West
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Wednesday, June 5th, 2013
The last day of the Exhibit Hall portion of DAC always arrives with a certain sensibility. Over the course of the 3 days, the place has become something between Our Town and a small college campus, and now with graduation it’s not clear when everyone will be together again. Yet the next phase of life beckons with all of its possibilities and trepidations, and people have to move on.
Happily this afternoon, as the 50th instantiation of DAC drew to a close in Austin, many residents of Our Town EDA could look forward to continuing the camaraderie at a first-ever DAC Banquet this evening at the nearby Four Seasons Hotel. Many of us were en route home by that time by plane, train or automobile and could not be there, but I hear tell it was a great evening. So my Top 10 on Day 3 in Austin starts with this late night report regarding the banquet thanks to ARM’s Tiffany Sparks, who was in attendance at the event.
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Tags: Analog System Design, Bagpipes, Bill Joyner, Brett Cline, Cadence, Carlo Tinella, CAST, Chris Rowen, DAC, Design Automation Conference, DOCEA, Flexras, Forte, Garrison Hefter, Gene Matter, Gunnar Scholl, Hal Barbour, Hayder Mrbet, Jasper, Kathryn Kranen, Landon Hegedus, Leon Stok, Niteka Raina, Our Town, Pat Pistilli, ProDesign, Rick Perry, Rob Rutenbar, Tensilica, Tiffany Sparks
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Thursday, May 16th, 2013
Let’s be honest. If you haven’t booked your flight and hotel yet for the Design Automation Conference in Austin in the first week of June, you’ve probably decided you’re not going. If that’s the case, more’s the pity because the sessions alone are going to be great, above and beyond the parties and networking, and will make the trip totally worthwhile. Here’s a sampling of the some of the topics that will be among the most compelling, with an acknowledgment that not everybody’s interests are the same.
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Tags: 3D-ICs, Applications & Architecture, Automotive Electronics, DAC, Design Automation Conference, finFET, Power & Thermal Constraints, Silicon Defects, Silicon Flashlight, System Design
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Thursday, May 9th, 2013
Declaring itself open for business this week, Sage Design Automation wants to make the world a better place: a) by providing automated design rule closure for advanced process nodes, and b) by lowering the barrier for and broadening the use of design-rule based checking, beyond foundry-provided rules, with a user-friendly GUI.
Speaking by phone with company CEO Coby Zelnik, previously CEO of Sagantec, I found he’s very jazzed about the new company and what it portends for the future. To explain Sage, he offered a brief history of things up to this point:
“Historically, there have been a lot of challenges in physical verification. In the last 20 years, it’s always been about speed of the tool and what size of chip it can process, and so on. All of these vendors were competing on how fast they could run DRC on the biggest chips. But nowadays, these tools can utilize, tens, hundreds, or even thousands of CPUs to get things done well, so there’s no more bottleneck there.
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Tags: Coby Zelnik, DAC, DRC deck, iDRM, Sage Design Automation
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Thursday, April 11th, 2013
DAC is almost here and spring is in the air, so why would anybody dwell on the negative? Because although the truth often hurts, it can be cathartic to get it out in the open, especially on the eve of DAC.
And the truth is that despite all of the celebrations, PR, and instant-bazillionaire stories associated with one company being acquired by another, these acquisitions actually precipitate a world of hurt – today, tomorrow, next year, and sometimes even on into the next decade. Acquisitions are never easy and the reverberations for the people involved often last for a long, long time.
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Tags: Acquisition, DAC, EDA
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Thursday, March 14th, 2013
From the podium in San Jose’s DoubleTree Hotel, Jasper Design Automation President & CEO Kathryn Kranen introduced tonight’s EDAC CEO Forecast Event as being “practically perfection” and she was right. With 97 people in the room, the event ran for 97 minutes and the audience [undoubtedly] gave the panel discussion a 97% approval rating. Kudos to all involved, including EDAC for hosting, and OCP-IP, Mod Marketing, and the DoubleTree for sponsoring the event.
Kranen started off the evening by bragging on good news out of EDA: It’s up and to the right for revenue in the industry, with a 4.9 percent increase between 3Q11 and 3Q12. She cited increased stock valuations over the last year for ARM [37%], Cadence [30%], Mentor [26%], PDF Solutions [98%], and Synopsys [17%] as an indication of the viability of EDA as an investment vehicle: If you’d put $100 into each of these companies a year ago, she said, you would have netted a 41% increase in a portfolio today worth $706.90, beating out other investment indices such as the NASDAQ and S&P 100 over the same time period.
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Tags: 14nm FinFET, Aart de Geus, Ansys, Apple, ARM, Cadence, Computer History Museum, DAC, DATE, DoubleTree, EDA Reunion, EUV, Google, Gordon Moore, Jasper Design Automation, Jim Hogan, Joe Costello, Kathryn Kranen, Lip-bu Tan, Mentor Graphics, MOD Marketing, Nimbic, OCP-IP, Raul Camposano, Rich Valera, Samsung, Simon Segars, Synopsys, Wally Rhines
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Thursday, January 31st, 2013
Just past 8:00 am in the Santa Clara Convention Center on Wednesday, January 30th, I had the good luck to run into IEC’s Dr. Barry Sullivan, long-time leader at DesignCon. Conversation’s always relaxed in that hour at any conference, and so it was with Barry. I asked him how things go with DesignCon, now that it’s owned and operated by UBM.
[Barry’s tenure with the conference predates the 2010 purchase of the conference by UBM, discussed here in a blog posted at the time by former EE Times Editor Nic Mokhoff.]
Barry said that UBM’s skill set is exactly aligned with the needs of DesignCon, and that’s a good thing. He said having a media company like UBM in charge is excellent for the conference. In the years prior to the acquisition, Barry said, the conference would sometimes have to “beg” the press to cover the event. With UBM at the helm, however, he said press coverage has been stupendous. I asked Barry if he thought DesignCon was out to replace DAC.
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Tags: Barry Sullivan, DAC, Santa Clara Convention Center, Tom Anderson, UBM
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Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013
Each time around, it’s an interesting exercise to see what conferences are being co-located with DAC, and this year is no different. From May 31st to June 2nd in Austin, the 2013 Electronic System Level Synthesis Conference [ESLsyn] will be co-located with the 50th Design Automation Conference. That’s a particularly interesting choice, because after so many years of ESL enthusiasts positioning system-level design at the center of all things EDA, why does it still need its own conference?
Well, let’s look at the organizers’ description of the meeting: “ESLsyn focuses on automated system design methods that enable efficient modeling, synthesis, exploration and verification of systems from high-level specifications down to lower level implementations.”
Okay. That’s sounds good. But, again, isn’t that stuff covered in a host of different sessions at DAC itself, in particular in Tracks EDA1 and EDA2?
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Tags: DAC, DAC 2013, EDA, Electronic system-level design, ESL, ESLsyn
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Thursday, November 22nd, 2012
If you are looking for an opportunity to express your satisfaction with a colleague’s contributions to the world you work in, two outstanding chances currently present themselves. But take care: The deadlines for submitting your nominations quickly approach.
First, Accellera Systems Initiative [a.k.a. Accellera] has set January 18th as the deadline for submitting nominations for its 2013 Technical Excellence Award. Per the organization: “The Award recognizes outstanding contributions in the creation of EDA and IP standards [which are then contributed to the IEEE Standards Association] by a member of an Accellera technical committee.
“Any individual who is a member of an Accellera technical committee is eligible to receive the award, which will be presented at Accellera Systems Initiative Day during DVCon 2013 next February in San Jose. Candidates may be nominated by the industry at large and are endorsed by Accellera committee members. To nominate an individual, visit Accellera.org.”
If you want to do something really dramatic, however, the EDA Consortium is currently accepting nominations for its annual EDAC/CEDA-sponsored Phil Kaufman Award, which these organizations frequently refer to as the Noble Prize of EDA.
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Tags: Accellera Systems Initiative, Accellera Technical Excellence Award, CEDA, DAC, EDAC, ICCAD, IEEE Standards Association, Kaufman Aard
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