Happy New Year in ASIC & EDA

I thought about writing a forward-looking article, making some predictions about our industry. But, so far, I am too lazy. ;-) Besides, that's what Gabe & Gary get paid the big bucks to do. So, here are links to their New Year columns with a bit of color from me.

• Gabe's column, Last minute deals open opportunities for 2007 and beyond, is focused and sounds plausible. His DFM story sounds good -- it needs to get more into the design phase, as a proactive guide to help people laying out the circuits. And I like his call for "Locality Sensitive Cells" that would be DFM-correct by construction. His other point, about Mentor's moves in the ESL and C-synthesis space, discusses alternatives to SystemC, and where C may be lacking as the perfect system-level language.
• Gary's "column" isn't really written by Gary. He has Richard Goering as his ghost writer! I have more problems with Gary's predictions that Gabe's. Gary is still predicting the ascendancy of ESL, FPGA, and embedded software. I still see plenty of challenge and opportunity in plain old RTL-based standard cell design! Gary does have 10 predictions, and it's worth looking over the rest of them for thought-provoking variety.