EDA CEOs
There have been several earlier reports and commentaries on the annual EDA CEO panel at DAC, but they are either strongly negative (Peggy Aycinena's "kill-me-now", Dan Nenni's "sleeping room only") or necessarily incomplete (Dylan McGrath and Nicolas Mokhoff at EETimes). It was a long session, and after listening to it a few times, as well as attending live, I see a lot of material that deserves more attention and discussion.
You can watch a video of the entire 1hr:15min discussion on the DAC website. Panel organizer professor Andrew Kahng also explains that he really was taking SMS messages on EDA Design Line. (That was a surprise, looked fake to me). Perhaps the "traditional" press may have seen the questions that were asked as "softballs", since they were not running the show. But I think there is value in hearing what the CEOs of Cadence, Mentor and Synopsys had to say, and that it is best gleaned by taking the time to break it all down.
Herein then, is my "random access" analysis of the DAC CEO panel. You can save time by going directly to any of the 15 questions that were asked during the panel.
PLEASE NOTE: To get the full benefit, you must be using the Firefox browser directly on my blog site. (Sorry, if IE is still your browser).
1.Introduction
2.What will be the impact of the economic downturn?
3.What are customer CEOs saying?
4.Innovation and venture capital investment in fabless companies
5.What advice do you have for EDA entrepreneurs?
6.How strong is the trend to customer consolidation?
7.Do you agree that EDA could get a larger share of semiconductor revenue?
8.Design services and silicon IP
9.Do you see EDA moving into automating design in other industries?
10.Is EDA addressing 3D?
11.What are you doing operationally to deal with market pressures?
12.What is being done to develop EDA talent?
13.How to keep students working on EDA problems?
14.What is the next silver bullet to have a substantial impact on design costs?
15.Closing comments
1. Introduction
Chair: Juan-Antonio Carballo - IBM Corp.
Panelists:
Aart de Geus - Synopsys, Inc.
Walden C. Rhines - Mentor Graphics Corp.
Lip-Bu Tan - Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
But EDA companies reward individual business units and product lines. Who owns the whole flow, including analog and digital? Will any EDA company structure themselves to address the whole-chip problem?
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15. Closing comments
Aart: At a crossroads moment, where success is a global challenge. Technology is the only way we can address some of the problems.
Lip-Bu: Recovery is on the horizon. New technology and consumer products need EDA.
Wally: Electronics industry is unique in ability to respond to economic disruptions. Predicts that next year at this time we will report a growth quarter for EDA.
My comments: The concluding optimistic remarks were not entirely consistent with the earlier discussions. EDA may begin an upward trend one year from now, but how much more contraction and attrition will occur before that happens?
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2 comments:
Mike,
I resonate with agreement on your point that EDA companies have organized around product lines and not flows. There is a General Manager for Digital Implementation, then a different GM for Analog plus Mixed-Signal. Because no single GM owns the entire flow, the tools from a single EDA vendor tend to be suboptimal.
Daniel
Happy New Year
Hillol Sarkar
www.ago-inc.com
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