Important Technology Developments of 2008 - Seeking Alpha

Happy New Year, dear readers! This time of year, it's irresistable to look back over the last year, and perhaps venture some forecasts for the coming one. Before I try to put together my own list, here's a list of The 10 Most Important Technology Developments of 2008 that covers technology broadly (not just semiconductors).

Most of the technologies cited are still nascent. While the iPhone is already significant, it's going to be quite a while before we see memristors in our chips. And I'll have to go look up graphine, since I've never heard of that for chip fabrication.

An Engineer's Guide to Dating

Thanks to John Blyler for pointing out these Funny Videos about Engineers

Happy Holidays, everyone! We survived 2008 and here's to a prosperous new year.

JohnB

Choice Careers

Would you advise smart young people to go into Engineering? It's a question our profession often ponders.

Consider the alternatives. Why not use one's attention to detail to become an attorney? Why not use one's mathematical prowess to go into finance? Become a "rocket scientist", a "master of the universe". I hadn't looked seriously at Wall Street careers, but the compensation described in The Reckoning - On Wall Street, Bonuses, Not Profits, Were Real - Series - NYTimes.com is truly staggering:

The bonanza redefined success for an entire generation. Graduates of top universities sought their fortunes in banking, rather than in careers like medicine, engineering or teaching. Wall Street worked its rookies hard, but it held out the promise of rich rewards. In college dorms, tales of 30-year-olds pulling down $5 million a year were legion.

Admittedly, now isn't the best moment to go into finance. Wall Street financiers are going to have to lay low for a while, lick their wounds, and make some pay for the Ponzi scheme(s) that will come out. But in the end, won't it come roaring back? From a monetary perspective, won't it always be more lucrative to be close to where money is changing hands, rather than cooped up in an R&D lab designing the next big thing? I'm not saying it's right, but that seems to be the way it is.

Last EDA Vendor Standing?

Man, there's some ugly financial results being reported by almost all EDA companies lately. Take a look at Sramana Mitra's financial review.

View the full lava chart at Wikinvest

And poor LogicVision is facing a measly $10M takeover offer, as John Ford covers in Merry Christmas… We want your company

Ms. Mitra surveys the current situation of EDA companies in the provocatively titled EDA: Bring Costello Back?. The title of the post alludes to Cadence's vacancy at the top, of course. For those of you too young to remember, Joe Costello was the charismatic and highly energetic CEO of Cadence from its founding through 1997. It's fun to reminisce about EDA's heyday and colorful characters, but it's probably wishful thinking that he'd want to come back and try to revive Cadence's business.

Meanwhile, John Cooley has a list of 47 candidates for Cadence CEO. What do you think about that list? I get his point, that he strongly believes the new leader should be an EDA veteran. But 47 names? Too unfocused. It's almost like he's name-dropping all the EDA executives he knows.

In my opinion, the best candidate might be a proven CEO or top executive of an EDA start-up, or an autonomous General Manager of an EDA company division. The candidate should be strong technically and have a track record of managing and growing the business. Not "just a Sales guy", or some VP who dropped into the company after it was already up and running. Perhaps a founder of the company, with passion and real leadership. Let's hope they find a great leader, both for the industry and the sake of chip designers everywhere.

Let's hope we don't end up with one company dominating the industry. That would be insufferable, like Ernestine the Operator's (monopoly) Telephone Company

How To Be World Class

Amidst the constant news of the struggling macroeconomy and generally bleak news in EDA and related industries, it'd be a good idea to focus on doing something positive.

How To Be World Class is a brief review of the talked-about book Outliers, which I hope you'll find inspirational.

‘Golden’ timing signoff

Ruben Molina of Extreme DA has a well-written article, ‘Golden’ timing signoff – does it correlate to Spice?. Certainly, one cannot argue that we treat SPICE simulation results as "golden" (for a given set of PVT conditions). At the same time, device-level SPICE is a lot harder to work with than gate-level tools such as static timing analyzers. Therefore, as he says, designers looking to qualify a tool may take the easy way out and compare the new tool to the de facto standard, even if the accuracy of the standard tool isn't well understood. SPICE should be the arbiter.

I sometimes feel sorry for new tool vendors going against a well-established "gorilla". They design the fastest, most accurate tool that they can, and then find customers complaining that it doesn't match the idiosyncracies of older tools. To add insult to injury, the aspiring tool vendor may have to add in "compatibility mode" features that produce less accurate or less sensible results, just to correlate to the tool the want to displace.

This has happened in EDA for a long time. Remember when Cadence's Verilog-XL was THE simulation standard? Upstarts, including Chronologic with VCS, couldn't just implement the Verilog spec. Customers forced them to mimic every quirk of Verilog-XL. It was the arbiter, much to competitor's frustration.

In the case of timing tools, it behooves tool vendors to offer a qualification flow. For example, to compare to SPICE, the tool should be able to select timing paths, write out accurate & valid SPICE decks, and make it easy to run the simulations by pointing to the SPICE tool and library models. In this way, it lowers the barrier for customers to compare against the "right" standard, instead of the easy one.

Password Arms Race

The overly paranoid Synopsys Solvnet's insane new password rules highlights what I also found to be ridiculous new password requirements for SolvNet.

I get the feeling that companies with customer web sites are viewing "password ridiculousness" as a measure of how valuable their site content is. Come on, it's just a knowledge base! If the user gets the password wrong after three tries, lock them out. Other than that, why make the password like a nuclear launch code?

Remote Software Debug?

Here's a query for all you software professionals out there: Are there tools or techniques that allow programmers to debug a program remotely? That is, can the executable and its data be on one server, and the source code and the engineer driving the debugger be on another server? This could be two servers in the same farm, or, more interestingly, the program could be running at the customer site, while the debugging is driven from the vendor's site.

I'm not a professional software engineer (just another Perl hacker), but this seems that it ought to be possible. I just don't know how to pull it off.

Two Strategies You Don't Want in Your Business Plan

1. We going to take on Intel head-on
2. Our technology is based on emulation

Novafora to buy once-highflying Transmeta for $256 Million

Transmeta, R.I.P.

Update: The Transmeta Deal: Why? summarizes the head-scratching financial aspect of this deal. Although $256 Million may sound like a lot, it turns out that Transmeta had almost that much cash in the bank! Therefore,

Excluding cash, the company is receiving just over $11 million for its entire portfolio of valuable technology that has been developed over ten years at a cost in excess of $400 million ...

ICCAD Presents Bloggers

We had a great "Birds of a Feather" meeting after ICCAD last evening. Sean Murphy did a superb job organizing and running the meeting. We had a good turnout of bloggers, wannabee bloggers, journalists, consultants, PR folks. Two of the topics that generated a spirited discussion were

1. Are individual bloggers and "corporate" bloggers in different categories? Some in the audience felt that corporate bloggers must feel constraints from their corporate sponsor. Most of the corporate bloggers asserted that they were in fact independent, and could write what they wanted.
2. What's the difference between a journalist and a blogger? This can be debated from many directions. It was even part of a Supreme Court case! From my perspective, they are different. Although journalists can also blog, independent (and part-time) bloggers such as myself find great benefit in dedicated, professional journalism. Many of my posts riff on articles from EETimes or EDN, for example.

   A typical blogger is more like a columnist than a reporter. It's essential to recognize and respect the difference between objective reporting (fair and balanced!) and the offering of opinions.

For the record, here's the "lightning talk" presentation that I gave. I thought I'd share it with my readers, and it's also a chance to try out this slick new Slideshare widget for embedding presentations.

ICCAD Blogging Birds of a Feather

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: cad eda)

Bloggers Flock to ICCAD

Fellow blogger Sean Murphy has organized an EDA Bloggers' Birds of a Feather meeting at the ICCAD conference in San Jose. The conference is going on right now, and the BOF meeting is Wednesday, November 12, 4-6pm.

Whether you write or read blogs or are just interested in EDA, please come join us! It's free, and in this economy, who can pass that up? I'll be one of about eight speakers giving a short talk before the open discussion. I plan to comment on my blogging experience, give tips on finding & following blogs, and share ideas for how to get involved. Hope to see you there.

Nice Work If You Can Get It

Chris Edwards' blog post The $8m goodbye describes last-minute employment contract sweeteners given the departing Cadence executive team, including the CEO: totalling that lot up, it will cost Cadence in the region of $8m cash to say goodbye to the bulk of its former senior executive team.

Can you say Golden Parachute? I guess as long as any laid-off rank & file workers will be offered similar terms, this is fine. That'll be happening, right?

View the full CDNS chart at Wikinvest

Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop

Cadence was supposed to announce quarterly financial results this afternoon, but they've found some "revenue recognition" questions resulting in a postponement: Cadence Announces Accounting Review and Postpones Release of Third Quarter 2008 Financial Results and Webcast

More ominously, there is wide speculation about job cuts coming to Cadence. Actually, the only "speculation" seems to be how bad it will be, whether 10-15% or as much as 25%. Scenarios are describe in Analysis: With Fister gone, Cadence layoffs may be next.

I don't know how the mood is outside of Silicon Valley or the US, but there's definitely a pallor over our industry and the economy in general. It seems like most all the EDA companies have had cuts or are planning them, and things aren't much better for their semiconductor-designing customers. At best, some companies are doing very selective hiring.

Good luck to all, and let's hope this rough spot doesn't become a quagmire.

No More Shoe Jokes for EDA

EDA pundits "won't have Mike Fister to kick around any more", as you can see by these changes afoot at Cadence.

AMD Announces Fabless Plan (finally!)

After months (years?) of speculation, AMD finally announced details of its plan to go fabless. Or is it Asset-Light? Or Asset-Smart? Let's just call it fabless, like everyone else in the industry. Read the details in A.M.D. to Split Into Two Operations - NYTimes.com. Amidst a battered overall market, AMD shares had a nice pop today:

View the full AMD chart at Wikinvest

So AMD is going to get a cash injection from a middle east "sovereign wealth" fund, plus a commitment to further invest in the fabs that they will jointly own. This is a good short-term financial shot in the arm.

We know that AMD can compete with Intel on design. The challenge has always been, how much of a disadvantage do they suffer by not having the most advanced fabs? This will be the long-term challenge, to see how well the JV will be able to compete with Intel's fab muscle as we go below 40nm and use exotic recipes such as "High-K Metal Gate". At least AMD will live to fight another day.

Update: For some skepticism on the added value and future prospects of the plan, see the story and comments under Who Benefits From A.M.D.’s Financial Engineering? - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Herb Reiter Tells the History of PrimeTime

In SKMurphy--Herb Reiter Interview on Fostering Static Timing Analysis Adoption, Herb Reiter talks about his career through the formative years of ASIC and EDA businesses. At Synopsys, he was instrumental in helping to define PrimeTime, and in particular in ensuring that PrimeTime was adopted and supported by the very influential ASIC vendors.

Looking back, times were simpler for EDA vendors when there were dominant ASIC vendors to define design methodology. Now, with the proliferation of fabless semiconductor design houses and the COT (customer owned tooling) hand-off model, it's harder to focus on a few key adopters, get their "sign-off certified" blessing, and reap the rewards as their customers flock to the anointed tools.

We know the result of the story--PrimeTime is the de facto standard static timing tool in the industry, and has been for over 10 years. Although in some respects PrimeTime is showing its age and could be vulnerable to competition, it is one of Synopsys' best-designed, most flexible, and robust tools.

On a personal note, I've known Herb Reiter since those MOTIVE and PrimeTime days, and he's a real professional and a gentleman. He really does seek to foster "win-win" relationships between his EDA clients and chip design companies. It's nice to see him getting publicity, and the opportunity to shed light on the development and roll-out of successful EDA products.

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!