Author Archives: paulmcl

Don’t listen to your customers

Posted on April 23, 2009 by paulmcl

There is a train of thought that the route to success in a business is giving a customer what they say they want. At some level this is obviously good advice. But there are two problems with it. Firstly, the … Continue reading →

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Guest blog: Phil Moorby

Posted on April 22, 2009 by paulmcl

Today’s guest blog is by Phil Moorby who back in the 1980s at Gateway Design Automation was the inventor of the Verilog language, for which he was given the prestigious Kauffman award in 2006. Gateway was, of course, acquired by … Continue reading →

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Bletchley park

Posted on April 21, 2009 by paulmcl

I spent a day last week at Bletchley Park, about an hour north of London. As I think is now well known, during the Second World War this was where a team of smart people, notably Alan Turing, broke the … Continue reading →

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EDA startups: channel costs $6M

Posted on April 20, 2009 by paulmcl

I’ve put together several business plans for EDA startups once the product is ready for market. One question is always how much money needs to be raised. The answer always turns out to be about $6M. When you put together … Continue reading →

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Systems: it’s turtles all the way down

Posted on April 17, 2009 by paulmcl

According to Steven Hawking, Bertrand Russell once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our … Continue reading →

Posted in methodology, semiconductor | Comments Off

Guest blog: Doug Fairbairn 2

Posted on April 16, 2009 by paulmcl

This is the second of two guest blogs from Doug Fairbairn about Lambda magazine (which became VLSI Design) and the early days of VLSI Technology. The first blog is here. VLSI Design, VLSI Technology Amazingly enough, Xerox agreed to underwrite … Continue reading →

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Competing with free EDA software

Posted on April 15, 2009 by paulmcl

Chris Anderson (editor of Wired, owner of TED, author of The Long Tail) has a new book called Free coming out in July. One thing that he emphasizes (at least in his articles on the subject, I’ve not seen the … Continue reading →

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Economist on semiconductor

Posted on April 14, 2009 by paulmcl

Jerry Sanders, the erstwhile CEO of AMD, was famous for saying that “real men have fabs.” So of course it was interesting that AMD should be just about the first integrated device manufacturer (IDM) to go fabless when it sold … Continue reading →

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Lambda magazine issue #1

Posted on April 13, 2009 by paulmcl

For anyone who would like a copy, Jim Rowson has put up the historic first issue of Lambda magazine (all 36 pages) so it is available through print on demand at  http://magcloud.com/browse/Issue/13162. It is an interesting time capsule of the … Continue reading →

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Move up to software

Posted on April 12, 2009 by paulmcl

I gave a dinner keynote at the Electronic Design Process 2009 meeting in Monterey last week. However, I’d already made the mistake of giving the secret recipe for any keynote speech (and, by way of confirmation, I received an email … Continue reading →

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