Daily Vim: Goodbye Vim, Hello Emacs

Oh no! What a way to begin the month! Just read of the loss of a fellow traveler, going to the dark side in Daily Vim: Goodbye Daily Vim, Hello Emacs. Emacs, of course, is a prime example of Zawinski's Law.

EDA Industry Update

Sramana Mitra posts her latest financial analysis of the leading EDA vendors at EDA Industry Update.

Some reactions to her points:

• Synopsys is king of the hill. Yes, obviously.
• Cadence should acquire Magma. I could see this happening. That's the kind of thing Cadence has done in the past, and Magma is getting small.
• Bring back Joe Costello. It would certainly energize the industry, but I doubt he'd want to, or that he could fix things alone.

Synopsys Lynx, a New Old Product

I'm at SNUG this week. I'll try to post more of a trip report after the fact. Aart's keynote speech yesterday was very listenable, as always. But I didn't feel there were a lot of major announcements or new insights.

One of the new announcements was a surprise to me: a flow management system called "Lynx". There's no way I can describe it better than harry … the ASIC guy � Synopsys Lynx Design System Debuts at SNUG.

I'm curious to learn more about it -- there's a SNUG session on it tomorrow. I'm a sucker for a pretty GUI, and I love automation. But I wonder how much business opportunity there is for this -- what is the target customer, and what is the value to them? Many large companies may already have something in place. But for a company just starting up a flow, this could be a quick start to "best practices" results.

Just don't call it a Framework!

Real-Time SNUG Tweets

Woz Dances to a Different Beat

Most all of you must be familiar with Steve Wozniak (personal site, Wikipedia article), legendary personal computer designer and Apple Computer co-founder. "Woz" has long been one of my hardware-design idols, alongside geniuses such as Seymour Cray (R.I.P.).

I've followed Woz's trajectory for a long time. I've seen him speak a couple of times, including as a featured guest at the Synopsys Users Group conference a couple of years ago. As a hardware engineer, you can't help but love Woz. He is truly a gifted designer, and his enthusiasm and passion are clear and sincere.

As Apple co-founder, he's a pretty wealthy guy, which gives him the luxury of pursuing whatever wild idea strikes his fancy. He's had a couple of brushes with pop culture (dating an actress/comedianne), but came out in a big way last week with an appearance on Dancing With the Stars.

You can see his debut here Wow! Woz continues to command my respect as a passionate engineer with absolutely no pretense. I can't help but laugh and wonder if this is the best "15 minutes of fame" moment for an electrical engineer, though. Rolling in on a Segway? Pink Boa? Ah, Woz, you really don't care what others think, do you? I love and respect you for that.

Tonight is his second appearance on DWTS. Hopefully it won't be his last. Check him out. And, in solidarity with our engineering brethren everywhere, give him your support. It would be sweet if some hackers got into the phone system and pumped up the votes for his performance. [the roots of Woz's technology wizardry began with "phreaking" phone systems to get free long-distance phone calls!]

SNUG is Coming to San Jose

It's that time of year for my favorite industry conference, SNUG: Synopsys Users Group - San Jose. I'm on the Technical Committee, so I might be biased. I hope to see you there!

At a glance:

SNUG San Jose 2009
March 16 - 18, 2009 

Location: Santa Clara Convention Center 
5001 Great America Parkway
Santa Clara, CA 95054

Here's the schedule. Contact your Synopsys support person or sign up online.

Cost-Reducing IEEE

Two years ago, in better economic times, I wrote a post Wondering about the IEEE, questioning whether being an IEEE member worth the US$140 dues.

Now, of course, the economy is in worse shape, my company is cost-reducing with a vengence, and IEEE membership is up to $169 (a 20% increase by my calculator). To put it politely, what is the IEEE thinking? It's like some government bureacracy run amok, growing on auto-pilot.

All of the concerns about benefits vs. cost, and the unease of not having a home for ASIC design and EDA, still exist. Now the cost has risen much faster than inflation and money is tighter. Time for us to part ways, until "some sunny day". (cue Vera Lynn/Pink Floyd)

Twittering Away EDA

Twitter mania is running wild! (I reserve judgement on whether this is a good thing.) In the early days, Twitter was only a factor in events like the MacWorld keynote, when so many geeks would be riffing on Steve Jobs' speech, it would crash Twitter's servers.

Now, I hear Twitter mentioned on MSNBC every five minutes (weird). And last week, Twitter came to an EDA conference. JL Gray and like-minded attendees "tweeted" their impressions of DVCon in real-time. JL followed up the conference with a recap via that "old-school" platform, blogging: Cool Verification: DVCon 2009 Wrap Up: Attendance.

I followed the DVCon tweet stream from time to time, but I felt you really had to be there. I didn't "get" many of the references, though it sometimes left me wishing for a live webcast to see what the excitement was about. Personally, I think Twitter is too hyped-up. Maybe, when most everyone is carrying a cell phone or MID with low-cost unlimited data access, it will create new ways of interacting and experiencing conferences. But for now, it is something to be figured out by early adopters.

EDA, Dead or Alive

Almost as good as attending the DVCon panel EDA: Dead or Alive? is reading Mike Demler's notes at The World is Analog: EDA: Dead or Alive? Apparently this is the successor to John Cooley's infamous Troublemakers panel.

Peggy said EDA tools are overpriced? Huh! How about giving me a quality product that doesn't crash so often! Makes Microsoft Office look like mission-critical software. [a pet peeve of mine which I hope to expand on in a future post]

Back to School Resources

In this tough economy, we should all be conscious of our inventory of job skills, with an eye on keeping up-to-date and marketable. Thanks to the Web, there's a wealth of training materials available online, such as at TechOnline University Fundamentals. The courses are generally short and practical. Certainly something to check out before buying expensive textbooks or enrolling in traditional classes.

U.S. And India's Tech Dilemma

Sramana Mitra's column in Forbes, U.S. And India's Tech Dilemma echoes some of the concerns I raised in Choice Careers. Although, after recent market carnage, finance careers seem far from a "hot ticket" for now.

A Classic, for Free

Off-topic except for the theme of "free things", Amazon.com is offering a free downloadable mp3 song for Valentine's Day.

You are ready for Valentine's Day, aren't you? Have a good one.

Cadence Links the News

The company may have a lot of turmoil in the executive suite, but Cadence really gets the latest web and social media trends. Cadence NewsLink has more articles and blog posts than you can shake a stick at covering all EDA domains. Their whole web site has a very modern feel, with pretty active blog postings, and easy ways to share links and leave comments to start a conversation.

Keeping the Day Job

To paraphrase real estate huckster Tom Vu , "do you have the guts to get rich blogging?"

Dan Lyons, more famously known as Fake Steve Jobs, wrote Growing Rich by Blogging Is a High-Tech Fairy Tale for his "day job" at newsweek.com.

It gives insight and some figures on the financial opportunities for bloggers. To cut to the chase: there's not a lot of opportunity! Certainly that's not why I blog, though it's nice to imagine the claimed average earnings of $5,060 per year.

It also gave me more insight into Dan Lyons, the person. As often happens, I liked the "fantasy person" Fake Steve Jobs better. I was disappointed to read that getting rich was a big reason for his launching the Fake Steve Jobs blog, which I found absolutely hilarious. Mark me naive for wishing he just wanted to share his creative gift with all of us. You do have a humourous gift, Dan. May you find a way to re-launch it and make a good living while you're at it.

Editor Learning Curves

Tip o' the hat to Daily Vim.

FREE Utility Grab-Bag

Enough the posts about how bad the industry or overall economy is. How about some FREE stuff? You can't pass that up (especially in this economy ;-).

Therefore, I'm highlighting a few useful commands or utility packages that an engineer might use regularly. I plan to follow this up with a post on useful free EDA packages. My "go-to" utilities are

screen

think of it as "text VNC". lightweight and low bandwith. Hey, most of what we do in VNC is textual anyway, right?

putty

rock-solid terminal client to access *nix from Windows

truecrypt

free industrial-strength encryption. Because you'd hate to have your USB drive or notebook PC data fall into the wrong hands.

xargs

*nix command to process a list (e.g., of file names) piped from another command

Cadence CTO Departs

Congratulations to John Blyler on his scoop JB’s Circuit � Cadence CTO Departs? Yes - It’s True. (I saw John's tweet about this early this morning.) The comments indicate that Jim Hogan, a big name from Cadence's past, is back and playing some role at Cadence. I'm curious to get the rest of the story.

Getting Kids Excited about Chip Design

I was at the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation yesterday to see their US-exclusive Leonardo exhibit. It really drives home what a genius Leonardo da Vinci was. He seemed to know everything knowable as of 1500, and the exhibits make it clear that he was a god of mechanical engineering (among many things).

If he were around today, with what's available with electrical and electronic engineering, imagine what he would have created! Who is the da Vinci of our day?

Besides this featured exhibit, the kids I brought and I explored the other Current Exhibits. I was excited to find displays on semiconductor design and manufacturing in the Silicon Workshop.

The design section is sponsored by Cadence and the EDA Consortium, and has hands-on activities showing what I knew to be logic design and physical design. I was excited to explain to the children how a few simple logic gates could be interconnected to control what actions would start the model car, turn on its lights, etc. And I think they enjoyed it, too.

Ask me again in ten years whether this influenced the kids at all to pursue science or engineering. I think it is a good attempt. Props to Cadence and EDAC for creating this to show what we do and inspire the next generation.

(images linked from The Tech web site)

AMD Cuts a Harbinger?

The story

AMD to slash 1,100 jobs, cut executive salaries (Reuters)

has variously been reported as "just a layoff", or, in this headline, layoffs + executive salary cuts. But if you read the article, the salary cuts apply to everyone who survives the layoff. Exempt employees, which includes engineers and other professionals, will get a 10% pay cut.

Ouch! People would prefer a cut to being laid off, but 10% could be quite a challenge for those who've been good consumers and not such good savers. I'm concerned that these measures will become more common as the economy continues to struggle.

As an aside, the article curiously mentions voluntary pay reduction measures for employees outside North America. What's a "voluntary pay reduction"? Does it mean "sacrifice for the greater good", or "volunteer or else something worse might befall you"?

Top 20 predictions for semis in 2009

Maybe rather than yet another blog post of 2008 review and 2009 predictions, I'll just flag provocative ones like EETimes.com's Top 20 predictions for semis in 2009 by Mark LaPedus.

Some of my favorite points:

• EDA's four large vendors will more than likely survive the year intact. ... Despite Cadence's play for Mentor last year, consolidation among the big four is unlikely because of too much product line overlap.
• The idea that TSMC might buy Cadence (or another large EDA vendor) has been floating around for years. But now that Cadence is on the ropes, is it more realistic? Offering a suite of EDA tools would make TSMC even more attractive to customers. But could TSMC charge as much for the tools as a standalone vendor? Not likely. ... But what if a company from an entirely different space made a play for Cadence just to get its foot in the door in EDA? What if a software company like Autodesk or Oracle decided to make a move? ... It makes for intriguing speculation, and it's not impossible. But it's a long shot at best. After all, who would want to get into the EDA business?
• [Under "Foundry Fools"] In 2009, I also see Samsung emerging as a foundry powerhouse, eventually pitting TSMC vs. Samsung as the leader in the arena.
• In ASICs, IBM Micro will scale back its efforts to few accounts. The same with TI. The big ASIC houses--NEC, Toshiba, and others--will spill more red ink. And the fabless guys--eASIC, eSilicon, Open-Silicon and others--will need to consolidate.
• [Under 450-mm conspiracy] Got some bad news for you Intel: AMD's foundry spin-off, The Foundry Company, is backed by Abu Dhabi. Cash-rich Abu Dhabi can already afford to build 20 450-mm fabs--and fund the equipment vendors as well. So, the joke is on Intel and the other backers of the 450-mm fab--TSMC and Samsung.
• Except for ARM, semi IP vendors will continue to lose money. Look for a wave of mergers in IP. How about a merger between MIPS and Virage?
• In the top-10 chip rankings in 2009, 5 out of the top 10 will end up being fabless. Qualcomm, Broadcom, MediaTek, Nvidia and perhaps another will be in the top 10. Global Unichip is an up and comer. The old line IDMs are sinking.

That's a lot of quoting, but there's even more good stuff in the article. The author definitely "names names" of which companies may fail and which will prevail.