Posts Tagged ‘EDAC’
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.
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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
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Monday, April 21st, 2014
In the moments prior to Cadence’s quarterly earnings call this afternoon, the company released news of the acquisition of Jasper Design Automation for $170 million, less $24 million in cash, and a small tremor rippled out across the EDA Nation.
Paraphrasing Cadence CEO Lip-Bu Tan in the early minutes of his 5pm ET earnings call: We are very pleased to announce a definitive agreement to acquire Jasper Design Automation. This will help us to further meet our customers’ needs for more advanced verification solutions, particularly today as verification now represents 70% of the cost of SoC development. Together, Cadence and Jasper can move forward, offering the strong formal verification solutions leading customers need. In addition, Cadence is also very pleased to be bringing on board the strong team at Jasper, a team with excellent real-world experience.
All good stuff, yes? So why any tremors in our beloved little EDA Nation?
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Tags: Aart de Geus, BDA, Cadence, Coverity, EDAC, formal verification, Forte, Innovation, Jasper Design Automation, Kathryn Kranen, Lip-bu Tan, M&A in EDA, Mentor Graphics, Oasys, Synopsys, Wally Rhines
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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.
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Tags: Analog FastSPICE, BDA, Berkeley Design Automation, Calibre, DAC, EDAC, Joe Sawicki, Mentor Graphics, Node2Node, Questa, Ravi Subramanian, Wally Rhines
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Thursday, January 23rd, 2014
Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away the EDA Empire began and quickly coalesced into several big players and a band of plucky startups constantly attempting to compete and stay viable.
Back in that halcyon era, Rick Carlson and Dave Millman decided to get those startups to pull as one, to try to keep the industry open and progressing, to protect the EDA industry as a place where new ideas could see the light of day and offerings from small companies could compete on a level playing field against those from the big players.
To do that, Rick and Dave came up with the idea for a consortium of Independent Design Automation Companies, IDAC, and put out the word to like-minded colleagues that this new group would benefit everybody. Creating IDAC proved more difficult than they had hoped, so letting pragmatism rule the day they approached Joe Costello for help, then CEO of Cadence, even though that meant working with one of the ‘big guys’ and hence, EDAC came to fruition.
To hear the rest of the story per Rick, recounted in a phone call in December, click here.
To hear the story recounted by Joe Costello, read below. I spoke with both Joe and Rick together on a conference call in mid-January.
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Revolution from within …
Joe began: “Rick told me he’s concerned that in his recent conversation with you about the history of EDAC, he may have sounded too harsh. I said that’s not possible, because the truth about the industry is quite harsh. Just thinking about it makes my blood boil.
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Tags: all-you-can-eat EDA, Broadcom, Cadence, Dave Millman, EDAC, EDAC Interoperability Lab, IDAC, Intel, Joe Costello, Mentor Graphics, Qualcomm, Rick Carlson, Samsung, Synopsys
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Wednesday, January 22nd, 2014
Before there was EDAC, there was IDAC. But before there was IDAC, there was just DA – Design Automation without Community or Consortium. The EDA industry consisted of a small number of large companies controlling the conversation, and a larger number of smaller companies who thought that if they linked hands they could do it better. It was Rick Carlson and Dave Millman who decided in 1986 to bring that group of small companies together to create IDAC, which stood for Independent Design Automation Companies.
According to Carlson, speaking on a recent phone call, “We wanted to get the small independent companies to work together in a cooperative way to deliver a solution, a flow, that was equal to or better than the big companies. And because even then, the leading-edge algorithms always came out of these small startups, we thought we had good solutions that the customers would appreciate.
“But there was a deeper, more fundamental issue that we hoped to solve by creating IDAC and that was how to grow the industry and foster innovation, whether in through a startup or an established player.”
Things didn’t work out exactly like Carlson and Millman had hoped for.
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Tags: Alain Hanover, Buck Feldman, Cadence, Cadnetix, Daisy, Dave Millman, Dazix, Design Automation, EDA Consortium, EDAC, EDAC Interoperability Lab, IDAC, Independent Design Automation Companies, Jim Hammock, Joe Costello, Mentor Graphics, Pete's Wicked Ale, Phil Kaufman, Phil Kaufman Award, Quickturn Design Systems, Rick Carlson, Ron Westergren, Silicon Compilers, Synopsys, Valid, ViewLogic
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Thursday, December 12th, 2013
At a recent tech conference in Silicon Valley, I had a chat with a long-time EDA player; let’s call him Elmer. The conversation came around to Jasper Design Automation and conjectures as to what’s ahead for the company. I recounted a small compare and contrast.
At the 2008 February EDAC CEO Forecast Panel, Jasper CEO Kathryn Kranen was on stage along with Synopsys CEO Aart de Geus, Mentor CEO Wally Rhines, and then-Cadence CEO Mike Fister. During the panel discussion, Kranen criticized the Big EDA companies on the panel for their ‘all you can eat’ business strategies – the big companies providing less-than-best-in-class point tools for free to customers who purchased their anchor products, which Kranen said made it nearly impossible for the smaller companies to compete.
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Tags: EDAC, Jasper Design Automation, Kathryn Kranen, Lucio Lanza
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Wednesday, August 7th, 2013
Well, it looks like the industry has done it again, delivering good growth over a recent quarter. The Press Release issued by EDAC’s Market Statistics Service on August 6th detailed the numbers for Q1_2013: 8.1% growth overall, including 23.8% growth in Services, 20.2% growth in IP, and (a bit less glam) 2.4% growth in EDA. Interesting.
Meanwhile, Dr. Wally Rhines continues to contribute to the industry by making himself available for conversation about the MSS numbers as they are released each period, clarifying as always that his comments are on behalf of EDAC and do not reflect his role as CEO of Mentor Graphics. When I spoke by phone with Rhines earlier this week, I asked him if we can anticipate industry results for all of 2013 by looking at the Q1 numbers.
He said no, EDAC numbers do not portend the future, they only aggregate the results from the past. To know more about the future of the industry, Rhines referred me to the four visionary keynotes given at DAC by Synopsys’ Aart de Geus, Cadence’s Lip-Bu Tan, Jasper’s Kathryn Kranen and Rhines’ own talk.
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Tags: Aart de Geus, ARM, Cadence, DAC 2013, EDAC, Jasper Design Automation, Kathryn Kranen, Lip-bu Tan, Mentor Graphics, MSS, Synopsys, Wally Rhines
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Thursday, May 2nd, 2013
Wednesday night, at the outset of the EDAC Jim Hogan/Joe Costello event, the DAC 2013 General Chair, Synopsys’ Yervant Zorian, took the stage to present a plethora of reasons why you should be coming to DAC in Austin in June. Here’s his list in the order in which it was presented:
No. 7 – When the DAC Executive Committee went looking for Austin-based EDA folks to assist in connecting the design community in Texas to the folks who plan DAC, the EC expected 3 or 4 persons to respond. Instead, over 35 people raised their hands and hence the Austin-based DAC committee is huge and has done a great job.
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Tags: Austin City Limits, DAC 2013, EDAC, Jim Hogan, Joe Costello, SKY Talks, Yervant Zorian
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Wednesday, May 1st, 2013
Joe Costello came to town tonight and wowed his acolytes.
 Thanks to EDAC, Kathryn Kranen, Steve Pollock, Bob Gardner, Jennifer Cermak, Jill Jacobs, Gloria Nichols, and Cadence – Jim Hogan hosted Costello on stage at Cadence’s San Jose Headquarters for a 90-minute event that was one part Reunion Tour [lotsa Cadence alums in the audience in addition to the two on stage], one part Pity Party for Mentor Joe & Mentor Jim [oh so many visits to VCs who failed to embrace a startup’s pitch], and one part Brag Fest for VC Joe & VC Jim [oh so many visits from potential startups whose pitch we simply could not embrace].
Add up those parts and you’ve still only got half of the content of tonight’s event; the other half of the Joe Costello Love-in consisted of a detailed Lesson in Rhetoric. Perhaps not surprising, given that the event was titled: Joe Costello Shares His Secrets for Communicating a Compelling Company Story. What is surprising is how closely Costello’s advice to his adoring audience mirrored Cicero’s Five Canons of Rhetoric.
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Tags: Bob Gardner, Cadence, Canons of Rhetoric, Cicero, EDAC, Gloria Nichols, Jennifer Cermak, Jill Jacobs, Jim Hogan, Joe Costello, Kathryn Kranen, Steve Pollock
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Wednesday, April 3rd, 2013
The EDA Consortium and the IEEE Council of EDA together announced today the recipient of this year’s Phil Kaufman Award for distinguished contributions to EDA – Chenming Hu, TSMC Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School at U.C. Berkeley.
Per the Press Release: “Dr. Chenming Hu is being recognized for his contributions in device physics, device modeling, and device reliability through BSIM and BERT models that have transformed the semiconductor manufacturing and EDA industries. Dr. Hu’s team invented the revolutionary 3D finFET transistor structure that simultaneously achieves size and power reduction to enable continued scaling of the microelectronic chips.”
Prof. Hu is a marvelous choice on the part of both EDAC and CEDA, but it is important to note that his contributions in EDA are the basis for the Phil Kaufman Award, not his work on the finFET – even though the latter is the hot topic in semiconductors today.
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Tags: Aart de Geus, CEDA, Chenming Hu, Donatella Sciuto, EDAC, Phil Kaufman Award
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