Author Archives: paulmcl

Guest blog: Soha Hassoun

Posted on June 25, 2009 by paulmcl

DAC is coming up late July, as I’m sure you know. For the first time this year there is a real user track in which users, unmoderated by EDA marketing droids, can talk about their experiences. Soha Hassoun of Tufts … Continue reading →

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Patents

Posted on June 24, 2009 by paulmcl

Patent law is a controversial subject and keeps popping up unexpectedly (for instance Ron Wilson writes about a case at Applied Materials here). I talked about it here in the context of CDMA and Qualcomm. The basic “tradeoff” in having … Continue reading →

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Hiring and firing in startups

Posted on June 23, 2009 by paulmcl

Startups have unique problems in human resources. For a start, they don’t have human resource departments or even, in the earliest days, anyone to even do the mechanical stuff of making sure the right forms are filled out. You have … Continue reading →

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More Moore: that iSuppli report

Posted on June 22, 2009 by paulmcl

The recent iSuppli report has been getting a lot of coverage (EDN, Wall Street Journal if you have a subscription). It somewhat predicts the end of Moore’s law. If you look at the graph you can see that no process … Continue reading →

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Friday puzzle: cube

Posted on June 19, 2009 by paulmcl

Last week’s puzzle was the “two switch” puzzle. To solve it, the group of prisoners must identify one person, the counter. Ignore switch B, it is there just to give people something to toggle if they don’t want to toggle … Continue reading →

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Chicken and the egg

Posted on June 19, 2009 by paulmcl

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? This question often gets posed as an example of a question that is impossible to answer, since plainly chickens come from eggs and eggs come from chickens. In EDA, there are chicken … Continue reading →

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EDA on the iPhone

Posted on June 18, 2009 by paulmcl

One thing that I’ve done in the last few months during my involuntary unemployment, other than writing this blog, has been to teach myself how to program the iPhone. Despite having been in marketing for over a decade, my background … Continue reading →

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Guest blog: Rob Dekker

Posted on June 17, 2009 by paulmcl

Today’s guest blog is Rob Dekker, the President and principal developer at Verific, who produce front-ends used by many EDA tool suppliers both big and small. Prior to founding Verific, Rob was at Exemplar where he was the principal developer … Continue reading →

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Board games

Posted on June 16, 2009 by paulmcl

I talked earlier about changing the CEO in startups. The board in any company really has two main functions. One is to advise the CEO since the board often has complementary experience. For example, older venture capital investors have probably … Continue reading →

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Your comp plan is showing

Posted on June 15, 2009 by paulmcl

I talked recently about setting up separate channels and when it made sense to do it, and about some aspects of channel conflict. One area where separate channels are usually required is when a business is global. Most EDA products, … Continue reading →

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