Top Semiconductor Infrastructure Stocks

Bullish on EDA? Check out Sramana Mitra's list of Top 9 Semiconductor Infrastructure Stocks.

I was surprised to see her put EDA companies at the top of her list, since she's described the EDA business model as "broken". It seems a combination of low share prices and the potential for industry shake-up through merger or LBO has attracted her to these companies.

HOT CHIPS Distinguished Panel Video

As an addendum to my report on the HOT CHIPS conference, I'm posting this link to the video highlights of the distinguished panel. [courtesy of IEEE Spectrum]

It was a thrill to see these giants of computer architecture talking informally and good-naturedly about the greatest hits and misses in microprocessor design. There were several references to the nearly perfect inverse relationship between architectural elegance and market success. That's right, they talked about the x86 architecture quite a bit.

Today in Semiconductor History

Chris Edwards' blog post the chip industry's quiet celebration salutes the innovations of our forebears and notes the "creative destruction" that's always been part of our industry.

Big Brother is Watching, and It's Fun

I'm at CDNLive (Cadence Users' Group), and consistent with Cadence adoption of new technology to support users, the conference features new intelligent name badges from nTAG Interactive.

"Name badge" is too mild a description for it. Each attendee gets a device the size of a large remote control with a lanyard. Besides having a traditional name tag sticker, the device functions like a dedicated PDA for the conference. It's chock full of features:

• Display of your personal conference itinerary. You know which session to go to at what time, and the paper abstract and speaker info is displayed on your nTAG screen.
• Updated conference schedule. Did presenters cancel or were new ones added? nTAG displays the current agenda.
• Social Networking! This is a fun feature. You hold up your device in front of another attendee's, and the screen displays something that you have in common (same business market, same hobbies or musical interests). And, at the push of a button, you can exchange business card information. After the conference, I'll be sent a report of all the people I met and a pointer to each session I attended.
• Online survey submission. After each session, we can rate it with a few clicks on the device. No paper required.
• A "points" system to encourage networking, filling out surveys, and attending the vendor expo. It's natural to see if you can earn more points. In this conference's case, earning enough points can get you a seat at tonight's poker tournament.

Overall, this gadget is pretty popular with attendees. We're all engineers, so we picked it up quickly and are happy to push all the buttons and explore the features.

What's sneaky is that I'm sure all this data is being transferred back to Cadence for some big-time data mining. They'll certainly track which sessions were attended and get the survey results. What else will they look at? Who networked with whom? I just hope they aren't tracking bathroom breaks. If my device lights up where I expect privacy, it's going down!

What's Hot at HOT CHIPS

I attended HOT CHIPS 20 on August 24-26 at Stanford University. HOT CHIPS' emphasis is more on computer server/system architecture than chip implementation. It's a nice small conference.

What follows are highlights of my conference notes. For more information, try to get a hold of the presentation copies, or attend next year's conference!

• x86 ISA is dominant for general purpose computing. (Interestingly, the x86 ISA was designed in a rush at Intel in a few weeks, to plug a product gap that they had. Not an elegant design intended to last for 30 years!)
• Multi-core is here today and used everywhere. (see Day of the Multicores) The jury is still out on how efficiently it can be used by software.
• Low Power design techniques are everywhere.
  • CPU architectures are changing for low power. Less speculative execution because abandoned computations waste power.
  • Clock gating is common at multiple levels
  • Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) is used in many chips.

Press Coverage

• Ron Wilson of EDN's blog has several in-depth posts about topics from the conference
• EETimes.com articles on NVIDIA/Intel, China's Godson, and Photovoltaics.

Cadence Reaches Out

Much has been written in recent weeks about Cadence's surprise bid for Mentor Graphics and subsequent abandonment of the deal. It's not the proudest time in the EDA industry. Happening in the meantime, garnering less publicity, are two promising initiatives that Cadence is taking to reach out to customers.

• CDNLive! Silicon Valley 2008 is the Cadence Users' annual conference in San Jose, a la Synopsys SNUG. It's worth checking out if you're a Cadence user. I haven't gone regularly but plan to attend this year. I hope to see you there.
• Cadence Community is a newly designed web community with blogs, white papers, etc. It looks much better than their prior site, and I'm hopeful that it will attract a critical mass of knowledgable users. The previous site tended to have too many off-the-wall or newbie questions to have a useful signal/noise ratio.

Cadence withdraws proposal to buy Mentor Graphics

Breaking news: Cadence withdraws proposal to buy Mentor Graphics - San Jose Mercury News.

Is this related to Cadence could find it tough to raise debt for bid? (Thanks to Daniel Payne for sharing the link through Plaxo.)

An Investor's View of Top Semiconductor Stocks

Sramana has a concise summary of her take on big semi companies and their prospects at Top 10 Semiconductor Stocks - Sramana Mitra on Strategy.

Agree or not, she has a pretty good handle on technology and business and presents her case clearly. It's a good starting point to form your opinions.

Dilbert on Management

It's tempting to comment, but I'll let Dilbert speak for itself. I apologize if the formatting is messed up in the blog. Click on the strip to see it at Dilbert's site.

Merger Musings

"EDA Peggy" Aycinena has written a thought-provoking analysis & commentary (dare I say synopsis?) of Cadence's bid for Mentor Graphics in EDACafe Weekly : The Summer of Our Discontent: War Games in EDA.

She's rather cynical on the motivations of some corporate management. I think there's a good dose of truth here. How many mergers are done to appear to be "doing something", even though there's a good chance it won't ultimately create value.

But inquiring minds want to know, will some CEO be able to buy oodles of Ferragamos with the bonus from the merger?

Interview Do's and Dont's

So I'm recruiting for a design methodology engineer and have been screening resumes and doing interviews. This experience leads me to want to share some advice that not everyone seems to know.

Do

• Send your resume in PDF (Acrobat). I know that .doc (Word) is the de facto standard, but I've seen some really strangely rendered resumes coming across in Word. In PDF, it really is what you see is what you get.
• Check spelling and grammar carefully. I mean, duh! For a document this important, isn't it worth the extra effort? You should also have another person (preferably an English major :-) proofread it.
• Keep it concise. As you go describe long-ago experience, you don't need to detail everything you've done. The classic guidance is to fit your resume on one page. I know that's difficult, but once it gets to three pages or more, you're probably including too much.
• In an interview, pay attention to your "talk/listen ratio". I just made that term up. It's important to make sure you understand the question and get periodic feedback that you're on the right track before launching into a soliliquy about all that you know.

Don't

• Assume the (first) interview will be non-technical. Some companies interview easier than others. But for the case where you really get grilled, you better have done your homework. Better safe than sorry.
• List project specs or customer names (non-public information) on your resume. I'm pretty sure this is technically in violation of some employment agreement or NDA. I'm surprised at how specific some resumes are, listing the customer name, content and specs of chips they've worked on. You can "sanitize" this information and still convey the complexity of what you've done.
• Make incredible claims for your contributions. I understand that you want to put your best face forward, and maybe even puff up things a big. But when I read that you "architected, developed, and implemented" a major feature of a tool in eight months, ...

10 Great Tech Books

There's more to life than books, you know, but not much more.

Morrissey, The Smiths

I love books and "top 10" or "must read" lists, so IEEE Spectrum: 10 Great Tech Books is irresistable.

Which are your favorites?
Which ones were missed?

I've only read two of them: The Design of Everyday Things and The Soul Of A New Machine. The latter one in particular I found enthralling and ample motivation for my college computer architecture design project! Nowadays it must seem like a history book, since it concerns designing DEC-compatible minicomputers. But the thrill of design and hunting down and quashing elusive bugs is timeless.

Shine On You Crazy Designers

Denali is famous for throwing the best parties at DAC. I wish I had been there to see these performances. See more at YouTube - DenaliDacParty's Channel.

A Chip Carl Sagan Would Be Proud Of

Remember the great astronomer Carl Sagan? He had a famous catch phrase describing the enormity of the universe, talking about "billions and billions" of objects.

Well, the semiconductor world has our first giga-transitor chip as shown in AnandTech: NVIDIA's 1.4 Billion Transistor GPU: GT200 Arrives as the GeForce GTX 280 & 260. Check out the article's die shot, which compares the GT200 GPU next to an Intel Penryn CPU. What a tour de force! Imagine all the EDA tools that chip must have broken, leaving vendors quaking in their shoes. :-)

In reading up on Carl Sagan,

• I was reminded of the petty and very amusing feud between Sagan and Apple Computer.
• I learned that "the indefinite and fictitious number Sagan has arisen in popular culture to indicate a count greater than 4 billion." Thanks to Moore's Law, we'll see the first "Sagan-chip" before you know it.

Mendence, the Merger

We have to come up with a clever name for the combination of Cadence and Mentor. Chris Edwards coined* Cadentor, which is actually a pretty decent name. Going the other way, Mendence is too close to "menace" or "mendacity", so I suppose the PR types won't buy that. (When AMD bought ATI, the irreverent press dubbed it DAAMIT.)

Cadence's unfriendly bid to acquire Mentor Graphics is red meat for the EDA blogoshpere! (Be sure to click on that link. It's a fascinating one-page summary of dozens of EDA news & opinion sources.)

I've read many thoughtful commentaries on the possibility. Frankly, most of them are unfavorable on the deal. Some of the substantial analyses:

• Can you guess Gabe's take on Cadence's arrogance?
• Chris Edwards initial take.
• Later, Chris has a very pretty picture of how the companies' main products line up at Overlaps 'r' us.
• Ron Wilson has a possible explanation (conspiracy theory?) for Cadence's motivations.

Two of the more curious quips I read:

• Customers don't want the EDA vendor to provide a complete front to back flow. They want best of breed tools, and for third party companies to link them together. I agree that we need best of breed tools, but not that we need third party companies to hook them together. Are there examples of companies that make a good business of that? That sounds like an ASIC company, and they aren't exactly thriving. There also used to be a company called Reshape that had their own physical design flow on top of commercial tools. But they ended up going out of business.
• Cadence acquiring Mentor could present a big challenge to Synopsys. Well, I don't know. When two established giants come together, what technological advance does that enable? Not much that I can see. A bigger challenge is when a giant acquires a startup with hot new technology: think Cadence with Get2Chip, or potentially Mentor with Sierra Design Automation. One successful big acquisition was Synopsys acquiring Avant! -- I don't know what went on under the covers, but the products were complementary and continued to be successful after the deal was done.

  Of course, there may be "business synergies" -- cutting common administrative and infrastructure costs, and having a bigger menu for "all you can eat" deals. But it's kind of sad if one of the biggest business events in EDA just comes down to that.

*Update: Gabe Moretti lays claim to coining "Cadentor". I'll let Chris and Gabe hash it out.

NEWS FLASH: Cadence Proposes to Acquire Mentor Graphics

And then there were three? This just in: Cadence Proposes to Acquire Mentor Graphics for $16.00 per Share in Cash.

What is Mentor good at? I haven't used their tools recently, but by reputation I think they're strong at

• DFT (FastScan)
• LVS/DRC (Calibre)
• Simulation (former ModelSim)
• Certain pieces of Place & Route (Sierra)

So, does Cadence need some or all of these pieces because they're not strong? That's certainly the case for DFT: Mentor is a leader and Cadence is an also-ran. Or are they just "buying" Mentor's customer base?

UPDATE: Other blog reactions:

• Cool Verification. A verification tools perspective.
• EDA Thoughts. No, honestly -- tell us what you really think of the merger!
• EDA Cafe. Several news releases, including Cadence's own presentation on the deal.
• Sramana Mitra on Strategy. She's been calling for a consolidation in EDA, or some kind of shakeup in the business model. Her post has a good selection of links to her previous writings on the EDA business. This post also has the best comments thread on the topic.

One More Thing: Apple to Tackle Parallel Computing

Apple in Parallel: Turning the PC World Upside Down? - Technology - New York Times Blog quotes Steve Jobs in a discussion of harnessing multi-core computing:

Apple, he asserted, has made a parallel-programming breakthrough.

It is all about the software, he said. Apple purchased a chip company, PA Semi, in April, but the heart of Snow Leopard will be about a parallel-programming technology that the company has code-named Grand Central.

“PA Semi is going to do system-on-chips for iPhones and iPods,” he said.

Grand Central will be at the heart of Snow Leopard, he said, and the shift in technology direction raises lots of fascinating questions, including what will happen to Apple’s partnership with Intel.

Snow Leopard will also tap the computing power inherent in the graphics processors that are now used in tandem with microprocessors in almost all personal and mobile computers. Mr. Jobs described a new processing standard that Apple is proposing called OpenCL (Open Compute LibraryComputing Language) which is intended to refocus graphics processors on standard computing functions.

“Basically it lets you use graphics processors to do computation,” he said. “It’s way beyond what Nvidia or anyone else has, and it’s really simple.”

Since Intel trails both Nvidia and A.M.D.’s ATI graphics processor division, it may mean that future Apple computers will look very different in terms of hardware.

Will OpenCL be an alternative to NVIDIA's Cuda software interface? Read the comments in the NY Times blog for some good technical analysis and the usual passion that surrounds any Apple pronouncement.

Update: see a thoughtful perspective in Chris Edward's blog.

Tantalizing But Flawed

I would love to know the real scoop on the semiconductor challenges and drama involved in developing a high-end gaming console like Microsoft's Xbox 360. A surprising story originating at DAC, EETimes.com - The truth about last year's Xbox 360 recall dangles some tantalizing clues.

I find the story frustrating and a bit flawed in helping to get to the truth of the matter. The article blames Microsoft's troubles on "bypassing an ASIC vendor to go directly to TSMC". But then it mentions ATI Technologies as a likely ASIC vendor. Huh? ATI, an ASIC vendor?

I would call ATI more of a "contract design house" in this deal. They have considerable graphics IP, and designed the GPU for the Xbox 360. (NVIDIA designed the GPU for the original Xbox.) Perhaps Microsoft decided to take only the design (netlist or GDS2) from ATI, and manage the silicon operations and production ramp themselves. That could be where they went astray. By not contracting with an experienced semiconductor company (like ATI or NVIDIA) to manage all the silicon issues, they exposed themselves to more risk. And maybe that came back to bite them in the form of the product defects exemplified by the "red ring of death" and led to product recalls.

Penny wise and pound foolish, Microsoft?

DAC 2008 Meta-Must-See List

That's right, readers. This is a list about lists!

I search the internet, so you don't have to.
-- From "your friend in the EDA Blogging business". (apologies to Tom Shane)

• Cheesy John Cooley's Must See List for DAC
• Ten top technology developments to see at DAC, SCDsource (Richard Goering)
• Gabe's teaser of Gary Smith's list. Looks like you have to visit them at DAC to get the real list. Gary has enough clout that companies issue press releases when they make his list!
• Gary Smith interviewed on YouTube. He names some significant trends in EDA this year, including Analog and Low Power design. The "Software" trend is a little harder to see; I know Gary has been calling for ESL to take off for a few years now.

What "EDA Blogger Birds" Could Squawk About

Next week at the Design Automation Conference, a few leading EDA bloggers are arranging an impromptu "Birds of a Feather" session at DAC. There have been several posts discussing the event. Informal Blogging Event at DAC Gains Interest has a good summary.

Although I'm not sure I'll be going down to Anaheim, I'm very intrigued by the event and would like to attend. What topics would EDA bloggers talk about? Here are some that I would like to discuss with my brethren:

• Online magazines, vendor communities, "DeepChip", and blogs: what each is good for.
• What to write about. What not to write about. What I really want to write about, but am afraid to.
• Frequency and regularity of posting.
• How to build audience. How to track audience. Support each other through linking and commenting. Use pictures? Polls?
• How to foster discussions. Pros and cons of comments. Need for an all-EDA bulletin board.
• Team blogging. (multiple authors contributing to one blog)
• Beyond blogging: social networks (LinkedIn, Plaxo). The Twitter phenomenon.
• Can you make any money? Ads: google or sponsored.
• For readers: how to find and follow blogs.

Incidentally, I've been blogging about EDA and Semiconductors for three years! My first post was about TSMC and low-power design; topics that are if anything, more relevant today.