Posts Tagged ‘EDA Consortium’
Thursday, December 21st, 2017
Verific Design Automation in based in Alameda, not exactly Silicon Valley, but close enough to be within driving distance. The company has been in existence for almost 20 years and reports few competitors, if any. Instead, they see themselves as the de-facto standard for HDL language parsers, and as such can be found in just about every chip design flow.
In fact, according to Rick Carlson, Verific VP of Worldwide Sales, he’s more astonished with each passing day just how many places applications developed on top of Verific can be found. Not because he doubts the quality of the product, but because of the wide diversity of industries who are now developing chips.
Rick Carlson also knows a thing or two about building collegiality between the companies that constitute the EDA industry. He was one of the founders of the EDA Consortium 30 years ago, and the Phil Kaufman Award. We spoke at length last month.
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Tags: AI, Apple, Applicon, ARM, Atari, Averant, Cadence, Calma, Commodore, Computervision, Daisy Systems, Dave Millman, EDA Consortium, EDA Systems, EDAC, Escalade, ESD Alliance, Go, IEEE 1801, IIT Chicago, Intel, Invionics, Mentor, Microsoft, Northstar, NVIDIA, Phil Kaufman Award, Qualcomm, RISC-V, Samsung, Sinclair, Steve Jobs, Synopsys, Synplicity, UPF 3.0, Valid Logic, Verific
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Thursday, April 13th, 2017
Every industry needs advocates, and Bob Gardner served with distinction in that role for many years. When he passed away this week, the industry lost both an articulate spokesman, and someone who had a deep and nuanced understanding of how the unique group of companies involved in EDA and IP come together to provide the crucial underpinnings of a global semiconductor design chain.
Gardner’s most important industry-wide contributions, of course, came during his eight years as Executive Director of the EDA Consortium. He had, however, many years of leadership and involvement in a variety of companies prior to his EDAC assignment, including roles at Verific, Signetics/Philips, AMD, Exemplar Logic, Design Acceleration, Bridges2Silicon, and ITeX.
Given that background, Gardner was able to bring decades of corporate wisdom to his role at EDAC and used it wisely to help craft the mission and work of the Consortium. During his tenure, the organization expanded its membership, became even more pro-active in promoting the common agenda for member companies, and helped to expand the visibility of EDAC across North America and into Europe and beyond.
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Tags: Bob Gardner, Design Automation and Test in Europe Conference, Design Automation Conference, EDA Consortium, EDAC, Robert M. Gardner, Verific
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Thursday, March 30th, 2017
Today is the day some EDA purists thought would never happen: The disassembling of an industry status quo that’s been in place for over 20 years
As of today, Mentor Graphics has been sold and is fully owned by Siemens. Now Mentor’s arc of history will be decided by folks not residing in the green forests and hills of northern Oregon, and the Big Three cartel is no more. A cartel which has slowly consolidated the playing field over time until nary a startup can be seen.
The power vested in the Big Three EDA companies has grown steadily and inexorably over these years, as has their market dominance. Examination of recent numbers provided by the ESD Alliance Market Statistics Service indicates that today, in excess of 85-percent of the revenue earned in the EDA industry can be attributed to the combination of Synopsys, Cadence, and Mentor Graphics.
These three companies, their leadership, sales prowess, and increasing control of the conversation and technical direction in the industry has made for a powerful cartel. But again, that cartel is no more and the crystal ball predicting future dynamics within the EDA industry has gone dark.
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Tags: Cadence, EDA Consortium, ESD Alliance, ESD Alliance Market Statistics Service, Gary Smith, Judith Marks, Mentor Graphics, Siemens, Synopsys, System-level design, Tony Hemmelgarn, Walden C. Rhines
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Thursday, September 29th, 2016
Dr. Andrzej J. Strojwas, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, has been named recipient of the 2016 Phil Kaufman Award for Distinguished Contributions to Electronic System Design.
Interestingly, this is the first year that the Kaufman award is being presented for contributions to Electronic System Design, not EDA. Very appropriate given that Strojwas’ contributions are in manufacturing and not design. Prof. Stojwas is CTO at PDF Solutions, which per company CEO John Kibarian has never been an EDA company. And with Kibarian serving as co-chair of the ESD Alliance, the organization formerly known as EDAC has now fully embraced its role across the entirety of electronic system design.
Besides this nod to EDAC’s ongoing evolution, the larger implications in CEDA and the ESD Alliance naming Andrzej Strojwas as this year’s Kaufman recipient are profound: The problems associated with electronic systems are not so much in the design these days, but in the extraordinary difficulties associated with manufacturing those designs. It’s really tough, as you all know, when the structures being manufactured are smaller than the wavelengths of light used to etch them.
Which bring us back to Dr. Strojwas. He has been CTO at PDF for 20 years. Back in the last century/millennium, the problems of manufacturing below 193 nanometers could only have been guessed at, yet the company was already working on the intriguing issues of capturing post-manufacturing data and somehow packaging it up to make it useful: How does the semiconductor supply chain glean vital information about the vagaries of manufacturing a real chip and send it back up to the designers so they can learn from the reality when they put pen to paper to design the next hypothetical?
This engineering of the engineering demands scientific curiosity, steely eyed attitudes towards the realities of physics and material science, and a large dollop of business savvy to navigate between the needs and demands of the foundries and the needs and demands of the designers. Let’s allow Dr. Strojwas to take it from here. We spoke by phone this week after his award was announced.
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Tags: 2016 Phil Kaufman Award, Andrzej Strojwas, Carnegie Mellon University, CEDA, Chenming Hu, Design for Manufacturing, EDA Consortium, ESD Alliance, IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation, John Chen, John Kibarian, Larry Pileggi, Moore's Law, PDF Solutions, Randy Bryant, Rick Wallace, Rob Aitken, Ron Rohrer, Semitech, Shishpal Rawat, SRC, Stephen Director, Texas Instruments, Wojciech Maly
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Thursday, April 7th, 2016
Several weeks ago, before the EDA Consortium was re-branded as the ESD Alliance, I had a chance to speak by phone with Bob Smith, Executive Director of the organization. I started by asking what concerned him the most about the re-launch. Bob was too optimistic to pick up on that negative note.
Instead he said, “It looks like we’re going to have a really good turnout for our event next week on March 30th, with well over 100 people expected. We are billing the evening as 90-percent social and only 10-percent business. I’ll speak for about 5 minutes and no longer, introducing the new name for EDAC.
“Mostly we want to have a get-together where people who haven’t seen each for a long time can enjoy catching up. We honestly hope that people will just have a good time. Also, it’s great that a number of the board members will be there.”
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Tags: Aart de Geus, Bob Smith, EDA Consortium, ESD Alliance, Grant Pierce, Lip-bu Tan, Simon Segars, Wally Rhines
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Thursday, March 31st, 2016
As much as the energetic re-branding of the EDA Consortium is to be admired, the name of the new organization is causing distress: If you want to find out more about the newly launched ESD Alliance, your online search will be fraught with angst. Why?
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Tags: Aart de Geus, Dean Drako, EDA Consortium, EDAC, Edsa Ford, Edsel Ford, ESD Alliance, ESDA, Grant Pierce, John Kibarian, Lip-bu Tan, Simon Segars, Wally Rhines
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Thursday, November 26th, 2015
It’s Thanksgiving and time to give thanks. Yes, we’re grateful for family, friends, and another year of opportunity in this tech-driven economy, but let’s also be grateful for EDAC. The Consortium is on a tear these days, offering programs, information, and networking with seemingly limitless zeal and energy.
Following two successful events in as many months – the Patents Panel in October and the Kaufman Award Dinner in November – EDAC is now offering in December another installment of their ongoing ‘Jim Hogan Emerging Companies Series.’ And given that EDAC’s food and wine in October and November were great, it’s pretty much guaranteed that this next event will really be gourmet. [hope, hope …]
But that’s not why EDAC’s December 9th event will be compelling; it’s the indefatigable Jim Hogan that will make it worth your while. Following a string of successful on-stage conversations over the last several years with seasoned EDA veterans such as Kathryn Kranen, Ravi Subramanian, and Joe Costello, the end-of-2015 edition will showcase Jim in conversation with Ansys GM & VP John Lee.
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Tags: Ansys, Apache Business Unit, EDA Consortium, Jim Hogan, John Lee, Vista Ventures
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Thursday, October 15th, 2015
Imperas Founder & CEO Simon Davidmann has been thinking about the EDA industry for a while, and the consortium that represents it. And like a lot of observers, he thinks change is in the air. In previous blogs, I myself have predicted that EDAC will evolve to offer better representation to IP providers, but Davidmann believes changes in the consortium will be even more dramatic.
“When EDAC was started,” Davidmann said in a recent phone call, “it was about CAD tools. But design automation has evolved from schematic layout and simulation to a point where everything is focused on really big designs. Yes, IP is a fundamental part of that evolution and companies like Synopsys have made a lot of investment in IP, so EDAC has no problem including IP in its landscape.
“But real problems today and tomorrow are about dealing with large systems on chips. Something that is moving the focus in the industry to software. Chip design is no longer just about design tools and IP, it’s about systems, and the software that runs on those platforms.
“As a consortium designed to help companies in the design automation business, therefore, EDAC has to look at not just design tools and IP. It also has to look at systems and software. An emerging technology, quickly moving into the mainstream, is virtual platforms for software development. Of course, Synopsys is investing in virtual platforms – an indication of the importance of such things in the design process.
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Tags: ARM, Cadence, Coverity, EDA Consortium, EDAC, Imagination Technologies, Imperas, inSilicon, Mentor Graphics, Simon Davidmann, Synopsys
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Wednesday, October 7th, 2015
If you already know that EDAC is hosting a panel in San Jose on October 29th – “Patents & Patents Litigation: Develop, Strengthen, and Protect Your Intellectual Property” – you know the participants come from a variety of backgrounds:
John Cabeca, Director of the Silicon Valley US Patent & Trademarks Office; Karna Nisewaner, Associate General Counsel at Cadence; Robert Sachs, Partner at Fenwick & West; John Vandenberg, Partner at Klarquist Sparkman; Salumeh Loesch, Associate at Klarquist Sparkman; and Samuel Liccardo, Mayor of San Jose.
You probably also know, however, that no matter how much optimism and happy talk is thrown at the topic of patents – how to craft them, prosecute and litigate – the underlying controversy will never go away.
That catastrophic and philosophical disconnect between:
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Tags: Cadence, EDA Consortium, EDAC, Fenwick & West, John Cabeca, John Vandenberg, Karna Nisewaner, Klarquist Sparkman, Mentor Graphics, Patent Litigation, Patent Prosecution, Robert Sachs, Salumeh Loesch, Samuel Liccardo, Synopsys, US Patent Office
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Wednesday, September 9th, 2015
This week, the EDA Consortium and the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation announced Dr. Walden C. Rhines as recipient of the 2015 Phil Kaufman Award, the EDA industry’s highest commendation for contributions to the business and technology of tools for electronic design automation.
Per the Press Release: “Dr. Rhines is being recognized for growing the EDA and IC design industries through his efforts as a leading voice of EDA and for pioneering the evolution of IC design to SoCs design.”
EDAC Executive Director Robert Smith is quoted in the Press Release, acknowledging Rhines having serving as EDAC Board Chair five different times: “Dr. Rhines has helped drive EDAC to a position of leadership, creating a mechanism for the EDA industry to grow and address common issues. He has worked tirelessly to promote EDA as a key enabler, driving the growth of the worldwide semiconductor industry as well.”
Paul Cohen, Chair of EDAC’s Market Statistics Services, is also quoted, acknowledging Rhines’ energetic, quarterly efforts to publicize and explain – for the benefit of analysts and press alike – the ebb and flow of the EDA industry: “Dr. Rhines was involved from the beginning with the quarterly EDAC Market Statistics Services, [which is] based on detailed revenue numbers voluntarily reported in confidence by public and private EDA, semiconductor intellectual property and design service companies. Rhines remains a strong advocate of the program as it approaches its 20th year.”
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Tags: 2015 Phil Kaufman Award, EDA Consortium, Georges Gielen, IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation, Paul Cohen, Robert Smith, Sani Nassif, Semiconductor Research Corporation, Walden Rhines
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