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.

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.