Author Archives: paulmcl

Friday puzzle: bananas

Last week’s puzzle was to estimate when the 20th record year of rainfall will occur in New York. The answer is in 272 million years time. In 1835 that year was a record year by definition. In 1836 there were … Continue reading

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Public affluence, private squalor

Somebody in a comment earlier this week said that I was especially turned off by unions in a post talking about California. Unions actually behave just the way that you would expect them to, to maximize their own power. The … Continue reading

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DAC in review

So now that there are a couple of weeks to allow a bit of introspection (also known as reading everyone else’s blogs) what were the big themes? On the technical side I think it is the fifth, or whatever, year … Continue reading

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Being too early to market

Startups have a singular focus on getting their product to market as quickly as possible. Given that focus, you’d think that the primary mode of failure for a startup would be being too late to market, but it’s actually hard … Continue reading

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Four Steps to the Epiphany

There’s a book on how to bring a product to market that is almost a samizdat document in the marketing world. It’s a privately published book originally intended to accompany a course at Berkeley and Stanford. It’s not the most … Continue reading

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Value propositions

I spent some time earlier this week giving someone a bit of free consulting about value propositions in EDA. If you take the high-level view then there seem to be three main value propositions in EDA: optimization, productivity and price. … Continue reading

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Friday puzzle: rainfall records

Last week’s puzzle was the toenail cancer test. The correct answer is that your chance of having toenail cancer is just under 1.9% obtained as follows. Of 20,000 people, 20 have toenail cancer (1 in 1000). Of those 20, 19 … Continue reading

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Where does everyone come from?

Where does all the brainpower that drives Silicon Valley come from? The answer, by and large, is not from round here. A good analogy I saw recently was with Hollywood. Where do all those pretty young actresses come from? By … Continue reading

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DAC attendance

Kevin Morris does a great job of dissecting the DAC attendance numbers. Since he has his FPGA hat on while doing this, one of the points he emphasizes is that most people doing electronic design are doing FPGA+software systems and … Continue reading

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Integration and differentiation

EDA acquisitions are very tricky to manage in most cases. This is because most acquisitions are acquiring two things: a business and a technology. In the long run the technology is usually the most important aspect of the acquisition but … Continue reading

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