Big Changes at EE Times, Cadence Gets More Social

I'm sorry to see EE Times and its sister publications ending their print runs after many years. In my career, it was the original and most highly valued industry news source. It was a thrill to "qualify" for a subscription and receive the first issue addressed to me in my first job.

Several top media types have now landed at Cadence as they beef up their social media presence. The latest is former EE Times editor Brian Fuller, as announced in Right Turn on Seely Avenue -- A New Blog from Brian Fuller.

Both Synopsys and Cadence are making significant efforts in reaching social media, and it's interesting to see the different approaches. Synopsys has long been cultivating in-house talent and has first-mover advantage. Cadence has taken a shortcut by hiring top-notch journalists.

We can enjoy both perspectives, but certainly miss the more objective reporting formerly provided by third-party media.

My DAC Shopping List

DAC is next week! Are you ready? Organized? Got those appointments line up?

Hopefully you're better prepared than I and started your research before yesterday. What sparked my action (finally) was a colleague asking me "what to see" at DAC.

Caveats

• I'm not including the major EDA vendors, particularly Synopsys. It's not because they're not interesting, but because they do a good job of keeping me informed, and I have other avenues for updates.
• My interest is in design implementation, so my picks are focused in that area. I don't work much with Verification tools. It's not to say there isn't equal or more innovation in that realm.
• The list is compiled from what's in my head and what interested me from my email Inbox. I hope to do more research and add more links over the coming days.

My List

Oasys

The most interesting synthesis competitor. Good buzz for the past several years, and backing from major customers like Intel and Xilinx.

Calypto

They're doing interesting things combining ESL design and verification, and have innovative products for power optimization.

RealIntent

Up and coming RTL Analysis company. Agile and innovative.

Forte

I'm forever trying to figure out where ESL design and synthesis fits. They've been working on this for years.

ChipEstimate

Silicon IP is important and will only grow more so as chip capacity grows exponentially. ChipEstimate helps provide the catalog and planning tools for assembling an SoC.

Atrenta

I haven't looked closely at what they're planning for DAC, but have caught a few headlines that refer to some mysterious big announcement. Will have to check it out.

Other Voices

• Gary Smith's What to See at DAC 2012 list.
• John Cooley's My Cheesy Must See List for DAC 2012.
• EE Times New companies at DAC for the first time in 2012. I can't figure out the URL, so leave it as an exercise for you to find. It's compiled by Brian Bailey.

Synopsys/ Magma - Gary Smith's take

Gary Smith gives his informed perspective on Synopsys/ Magma - Great Acquisition, Difficult Merger :: Gary Smith EDA. I like that he names names with respect to which Synopsys products aren't cutting it. On paper, it seemed like a great deal of overlap between the two companies. But Gary argues that Synopsys wasn't competitive in several of these areas, and the Magma tools will give them a stronger line-up.

This point is hard to argue with:

The static timing analyzer will be a big issue with the customer base. With their recent acquisition of Extreme DA, and now Magma, Synopsys has regained their Franchise position in the important Static Timing market. This is not a good thing for the design engineer. Only competition drives tool improvements.

But how's this for bravado?

Magma brags that they can achieve better results with a five man team than Synopsys can with a fifty man team.

That's the sort of claim I might believe from an EDA startup; could a public company (no longer a spring chicken) be so agile, or is this coming from the supreme confidence of their CEO?

The Engadget Interview: ARM co-founder John Biggs

Happy New Year and welcome to 2012! The Engadget Interview: ARM co-founder John Biggs -- Engadget covers the interesting history, philosophy, and future of ARM Holdings. As you will learn from the article, it's a company that might never have been started were it not for Intel.

Steve Jobs’s Best Quotes

In honor of Steve Jobs on the day of his resignation as Apple CEO: Steve Jobs’s Best Quotes - Digits - WSJ. I'm most inspired by the things he has to say about design, and life. And most amused by what he says about Microsoft.

When Trolls Attack

Ever listen to This American Life? Ira Glass is a great story teller. This week's episode is very relevant to our industry.

It's on the long side. You can listen to it here, or do as I do and load it as a podcast onto your personal media player of choice. Then you can listen while washing the dishes, walking the dog, etc. Multi-tasking!

Who's your (least) favorite EDA/IP patent troll?

Insanely Great or Just Insane?

A fascinating inside look at Apple and Steve Jobs' management style, excerpted on wired.com. The full article is available for purchase and download at Amazon.

I'm happy to be an Apple customer instead of reporting to Steve!

Intel to Sprout Fins

Wow, is "FinFET" happening already? It will soon, according to Intel putting fins on at 22-nm.

Intel will ramp manufacturing of these devices next year for their 22nm process shrink of Sandy Bridge CPUs. That appears to be a full process generation ahead of leading foundries such as TSMC, and the low-power advantage would help Intel become more competitive in the elusive mobile market.

Apple Tea Leaves, Viscera or Dark Matter

I'm not sure which is the right analogy, but in reading A5: All Apple, part mystery, I find this article to (1) be an interesting survey of the state of Apple silicon, and (2) an article that goes on and on but doesn't contain any factual information.

Apple's wall of silence is unprecedented in the industry. While much has been said about Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field, equally impressive is the control that Apple exhibits over employees and suppliers to suppress all leaks. Have you seen many Apple presentations at industry conferences?

Cooley's Take on IPO Candidate Apache Design

Props to John Cooley for his article looking at Apache Design's history and products. It's been 10 years since the last EDA IPO? Surprising and troubling. Let's hope it's less than a decade for the next one.

Email from John:

           http://www.deepchip.com/gadfly/gad031811.html

     INDUSTRY GADFLY: "A brief history of Apache and its IPO"

                         by John Cooley

  On Monday, Apache Design Solutions, Inc. (APAD) filed to IPO for
  $75 million as a publically traded stock on the NASDAQ.

  The last company to successfully IPO in EDA was 10 years ago.  It
  was Magma, which raised $63 million back in 2001....

           http://www.deepchip.com/gadfly/gad031811.html

Books About EDA

I'm intrigued by EDAgraffiti, a new book on our industry and plan to buy a copy. See this good review by Clive Maxfield.

Before that, the only other book I had seen on EDA was about the start of the ASIC industry, Silicon Destiny: The Story of Application Specific Integrated Circuits and Lsi Logic Corporation, which is pretty hard to find.

Most Dominant Franchise in EDA

I got to wondering -- which tool has the biggest lock on a major piece of the EDA tool constellation? (I originally wrote "monopoly" instead of "franchise", but don't want to connote market manipulation.) From my perspective, three come quickly to mind

• Cadence Virtuoso
• Synopsys Design Compiler
• Synopsys PrimeTime

You may have other ideas, and I'd love to hear other nominations. Of these three, I think a good case can be made for Design Compiler having the strongest position. The other tools have large market shares, but also competition determined to make inroads.

Who might chip away at the synthesis gorilla? The old and new rivals are Cadence RTL Compiler and Oasys Real Time Designer. Just published on ESNUG is this "marketmonial" (I need a word for a marketing-inspired testimonial): DeepChip.com: "An Oasys RealTime Designer vs. SNPS DC-Topo/DC-Graphical benchmark . A couple of things that I especially like about Oasys' approach:

• If Oasys truly optimizes at a higher level of abstraction (physical feedback can change the way RTL structure is synthesized), then substantial performance advantage claims become believable
• It freely exports DEF and integrates with the physical design world. By contrast, DC Topographical/Graphical can't decide whether it wants to be complete physical synthesis or "PD-lite", not fully supporting or integrating with detailed physical design data. (RTL Compiler is open like the Oasys tool in this regard -- it interfaces with Encounter P&R tools using standard data exchange formats.)

Time will render the verdict, and the EDA battlefield is littered with past attacks on DC's franchise, but we need competition in all tool areas to continue advancing the state of the art.

Oops!... Intel Did It Again

Intel, if you need reliable designs to support your latest CPUs, there used to be a variety of companies in the chipset business.

January 2011 had more than its fair share of bad news for Intel, culminating in a very expensive recall of their newest chipsets because of a design defect. Most of the press coverage focused on the financial hit, but us design engineers are dying to know "what happened?". What's most interesting is that the problem isn't a defect that manifests itself right away, but one the causes the component to deteriorate over time. At first, I thought "electromigration". But the best speculation/analysis I've seen this early has been from Mike Demler, who shares his theories in Price for a new SATA I/O $700M. A complete AMS verification? Priceless! and If ever EDA needed a ($700M) proof point on their value....

If that's the root cause of this problem, it's another data point showing fraying at the edges of our tried and true EDA suites: tools are not available or mature to help with analyzing reliability, materials, packaging, etc.

Update: Thanks to a link from Steve Leibson, I came across this very specific description and analysis of the problem.

Birth of a World Beater

If you followed the Consumer Electronics Show news at all last week, you heard a lot about ARM, ARM, ARM. Mindshare-wise, it would appear to have Intel on the defensive. (I wonder how Intel feels about selling off their StrongARM now?)

I plan to learn more about ARM's architecture and products. For today's history lesson, Birth of a world beater features one of the original ARM designers.

I'm curious to learn the technical merits of the ARM architecture. Is it inherently superior? Or is the main advantage the scads of software eco-system available, with low-power coming from standard implementation and process tricks?

Technical superiority and business success don't always go hand-in-hand, anyway. I've attend HOTChips before, and I was amused how all the microprocessor experts there bemoaned x86's incredible success, even though they knew it was inferior to [insert your favorite CPU here];. x86 was just good enough to survive, and had been in the right place at the right time. Is now the time for ARM?

First There Was Semi-Blog

now: SemiWiki! Created by several fellow EDA bloggers, this is an intriguing new EDA/Chip Design site worth visiting and contributing to.

I know that several bloggers and old ASIC hands wanted to put together an open community for sharing opinions and experiences, and this is the most substantive effort to date. (I tip my hat to John Ford's now-defunct "DFT Digest" site, which was a pioneer in this area.)

A Concise Story of the ASIC/EDA Business

Check out Jim Hogan's article, The evolution of design methodology.

Past history is crystal clear and his description spot on. His assessment of current and future value-add is plausible and thought provoking. Sounds dire for many silicon-centric companies, though. Will you be a survivor? What does it say for the fortunes of the EDA industry? His answer seems to be focus on system/software, complemented by C-based hardware design.

Magma & Synopsys CEOs Discuss Quarterly Results

It's been a good year for EDA stocks. Here are the latest CEO business discussions from Synopsys and Magma:

• Synopsys CEO Discusses F4Q2010 Results – Earnings Call Transcript -- Seeking Alpha
• Magma Design Automation CEO Discusses F2Q2011 Results – Earnings Call Transcript

LSI Logic's 30th reunion!

Who's who at LSI Logic's 30th reunion gives a great synopsis of the pioneering company in the ASIC/EDA industry. To read the whole story, track down a copy of Silicon Destiny: The Story of Application Specific Integrated Circuits and Lsi Logic Corporation, by Rob Walker, one of the founders of LSI Logic. (I have an autographed edition!)

Intel Opens the Factory Door. A Little.

In the early 2000s, Intel dabbled in becoming an ASIC vendor. They eventually cancelled that business venture. Now we read that Intel, in a very controlled way, will be Making Advanced Chips for Third Parties. Advanced, as in 22nm!

But this is much more focused than a merchant ASIC business. FPGA itself is more like a Standard Product, with high volumes and lots of benefit from using advanced processes. Altera and Xilinx are the most leading-edge customers for the established foundries. It'll be interesting to see Intel's motives beyond just "further monetizing the fab".

Blue Light Special on Software

Software is on sale in China! So says Software Companies Lower Prices to Fight Piracy in China, which reports that Microsoft and Autodesk are slashing prices of their OS and CAD software, respectively, in an effort to capture some revenue for their otherwise widely-pirated software.

Does the same thing happen with EDA software? The state of the EDA business in Asia is something I only know from the occasional rumor. How widespread is EDA piracy? How common is it to "crack" FlexLM? And, is EDA software already heavily discounted in Asian markets?

The last point most concerns American workers. Not only are American competing from a higher wage/cost-of-living, but what if the essential tools of our trade are cheaper overseas, as well? Strike two!