Posts Tagged ‘EDA’
Wednesday, November 19th, 2014
Sometimes shocking news arrives quietly, like fog over the Bay. In the very first sentence of his glamorous November 3rd keynote at ICCAD in Silicon Valley, Bosch VP of Engineering Peter van Staa bluntly told his audience that EDA would “probably not” help solve the problems related to electronic designs for the cars of the future. He then spent the next 45 minutes explaining instead how Bosch would.
“Bosch is unique,” van Staa said. With 42,000 employees and 4.5 billion euros spent in 2013 alone for R&D across multiple silos – energy and building technologies, consumer goods, industrial controls, and mobile “solutions” [anything driven by an engine being a particular focus] – the Stuttgart-based company is spewing out “an invention every 25 minutes.” [Can any EDA company make such a claim?]
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Tags: autonomous vehicles, Bosch, EDA, Google, ICCAD, Peter van Staa, Robert Bosch Center for Power Electronics, self-driving cars
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Wednesday, October 8th, 2014
Exhibiting that unique combo of energy, hubris, and eloquence that’s the hallmark of Silicon Valley CEOs everywhere, Kathryn Kranen bid adieu to the EDA industry tonight. Sitting on the Cadence stage in conversation with Vista Ventures’ Jim Hogan – an event billed as part of EDAC’s ongoing Emerging Companies Series – Kranen walked the audience through highlights of her career, with special emphasis on the last 11 years serving as CEO at Jasper, a company she sold to Cadence earlier this year for a reported price of $174 million.
Up until the end of the evening, the exchange between these seasoned veterans of EDA proceeded as advertised – full of pithy advice on starting up startups, as well as enthusiastic endorsements of opportunities in the industry and good-natured banter between two highly successful people who know what it takes to grow and sell a company in high-tech. In the end, however, the evening turned out to be far, far more. It turned out to be Kathryn Kranen’s swan song in EDA.
Toward the end of her 90-minute interview with Hogan, things went historic when Kranen offered not only that she’s leaving Cadence just 4 months after the Jasper acquisition, but she’s leaving EDA completely. According to Kranen, she wants to serve at a company in the size range of Jasper, 100 to 150 employees, but enterprises of that scale are almost impossible to assemble these days in EDA. Since she wants to lead a moderately-sized company, but those options are not available here, she’s looking instead for opportunities outside the industry.
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Tags: Cadence, EDA, EDAC, Jasper Design Automation, Jim Hogan, Kathryn Kranen, Lucio Lanza, Mike Schuh, Oz Levia
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Thursday, October 2nd, 2014
The conversation will be historic on the evening of Wednesday, October 8th, when Cadence Design Systems hosts the next installment of EDAC’s Emerging Companies Series.
The conversation will be historic, because it will include the past history of Cadence interviewing the present and future history of Cadence; Jim Hogan was a Senior Vice President at the company in the 1990’s, and Kathryn Kranen is a Corporate Vice President and General Manager at the company today. What these two don’t know about Cadence, its past, present, and future – or the entire EDA industry for that matter – is truly not worth knowing.
And beyond these credentials, there’s the fact that both Kranen and Hogan could easily fill the 90 minutes of the session individually. They’re both great public speakers, and both own a plethora of insights about innovation, high-tech enterprise, Silicon Valley, raising and spending venture capital, the art and science of mergers and acquisitions, and taking companies public. These two epitomize the intelligence and instincts that create success in The Valley, with particular gifts of leadership in the EDA industry.
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Tags: Cadence, EDA, EDAC, Emerging Companies Series, Jim Hogan, Kathryn Kranen
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Thursday, August 7th, 2014
Ten years ago, numerous hardworking folks in EDAC struggled long and tenaciously to get EDA software removed from a host of restricted-overseas-commerce lists. For those efforts several members of the EDAC community were honored, while sighs of relief were breathed that the industry would not be foolishly restricted by the U.S. Government from exporting their agnostic-to-end-use software.
After all, why would electronic design software have anything to do with communications, avionics, surveillance, ground-based mechanized weaponry, or surface-to-air missile guidance systems, let alone a host of other electronic junk? ‘Just because we made it, doesn’t mean we want it to be used by the bad guys for evil purposes,’ the EDA industry said. And added, ‘Heck, we just produce the stuff. We’re not responsible for how it’s used.’
Of course, that’s not to say that restrictions and guidelines for international commerce have not applied to both EDA and IP. In September of last year, I attended an evening seminar hosted by EDAC that, thanks to the articulate intelligence of Cadence Group Director for Export Compliance and Government Relations Larry Disenhof, outlined in detail the complexities and convoluted guidelines that business folks in the United States must adhere to if they want to stay legal and in business when participating in overseas trade.
It all seemed highly confusing and fraught with the dangers of inadvertently operating outside the lines of what the U.S. Government considered appropriate behavior. Nonetheless, Disenhof offered hope that if companies paid close, close attention to the shifting sands of international relations – pretty much on a daily basis – they would be okay when it comes to obeying the law.
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Tags: Cadence, EDA, EDAC, Larry Disenhof, Mentor Graphics, Moscow, Synopsys, Trade restrictions
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Wednesday, July 16th, 2014
Despite its ethereal-sounding name, Silicon Cloud International is a company grounded in the reality of chip design, particularly for an important international demographic, professors and students. Mojy Chian is CEO of the Singapore-based SCI. We spoke recently by phone.
Chian started by defining the cloud. “The concept of the cloud is straightforward. It means remote computing, so if you are not using your local machine, you are using the cloud. There are a lot of applications in the cloud, including eCommerce, Facebook, cloud storage, and remote collaboration based in the cloud.
“Certainly, usage of the cloud has taken off in recent years, but remember there are several different types of clouds. In contrast to private cloud computing, public cloud computing means accessing machines [owned by other companies such as Amazon], where you can actually go and use their machines.”
Our conversation being specific to chip design, I asked Chian to comment on widespread industry concerns regarding security when working in the public cloud. Companies are oft-times reluctant to compute and/or store their designs in the public cloud for fear of losing their precious data to hackers and pirates.
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Tags: Cadence, cloud computing, EDA, GlobalFoundries, Mojy Chian, MOSIS, private cloud, public cloud, Silicon Cloud International, SRC, Synopsys, TSMC
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Thursday, April 10th, 2014
As a journalist, you often talk to product managers of EDA companies. Sometimes, you talk to VPs, SVPs, or even EVPs. On the rare occasion, you might event speak with a CEO. This last, being more likely if it’s the CEO of a small EDA company. Of course, these days small companies in the industry are harder and harder to come by, consolidation being the current national pastime across the width and breadth of the EDA Nation.
As a journalist, however, the kind of person you rarely talk to is someone in sales. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
On the rare occasion when a journalist talks to an EDA sales person, it’s usually at big vendor-sponsored dinners associated with large conferences, evening events set aside to entertain press, analysts, and customers where there’s some sort of company rep assigned to sit at each table. It’s on those rare occasions that a journalist might accidentally end up sitting next to, and talking to, someone from EDA Sales – all the way through the salad, the main course, the dessert, and even through the after-dinner entertainment.
And it’s during those rare encounters at big dinners that many journalists realize that the EDA industry they thought they knew, is a completely different kettle of fish, a completely different entity, from the one where EDA sales people live and work.
EDA Sales occupies a completely different EDA Nation from the one journalists hear about from EDA product managers, executives, or marcom specialists who busily spin narratives about the company specifically for the benefit of the press and the endearing little stories they write.
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Tags: CAD tools, EDA, EDA Sales
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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.
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Tags: Bagpipers, Brett Cline, Cadence, DAC, Design Automation Conference, EDA, ESL, Forte Design Systems, John Cooley, John Sanguinetti, Lucio Lanza
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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.]
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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.
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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
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Thursday, June 13th, 2013
Every year, Forbes publishes a list of the Best Companies To Work For. The winners are always big companies, ones well known by you and me. The problem is that Forbes’ polling techniques are flawed. If they were not, EDA stalwart Real Intent would most definitely make the list, particularly if the folks from Forbes were to have been in on a recent phone call with Real Intent President & CEO Prakash Narain.
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Tags: AMD, EDA, IBM, Prakash Narain, Real Intent, Sun Microsystems
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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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