Author Archives: paulmcl

Why is EDA so buggy?

Posted on January 27, 2009 by paulmcl

I have sat through numerous keynote speeches by CTOs of semiconductor companies berating the EDA industry for shipping tools that are full of bugs and that are late, not ready enough in advance of the appropriate process node. Of course … Continue reading →

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Gong xi fa cai

Posted on January 26, 2009 by paulmcl

It’s Chinese New Year, or the spring festival as the Chinese call it, the start of a year of the Ox. It is also, by coincidence, Australia day, the equivalent of July 4th down there. But there is not much … Continue reading →

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Recutting the semiconductor pie

Posted on January 23, 2009 by paulmcl

Qimonda, the memory spinout from Infineon, itself the semiconductor spinout from Siemens filed for bankruptcy today. This is not all that significant for EDA since memory companies have few designs and enormous volumes. Larry Grant, the corporate counsel when I … Continue reading →

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What color is a green card?

Posted on January 23, 2009 by paulmcl

Most American don’t know the answer, which is today off-white. Mine is alongside. Presumably it was green once. I’m an immigrant. I was born and brought up in the UK and came to the US in 1982 on an H-1 … Continue reading →

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Venture capital for EDA is dead

Posted on January 22, 2009 by paulmcl

There have been a couple of recent articles about venture capital in Business Week, ABC News and elsewhere. They have focused on venture capital being broken since many funds are losing money and even that venture capital, in aggregate, is investing … Continue reading →

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Why did EDA have a hardware business model?

Posted on January 21, 2009 by paulmcl

EDA really started back in the 1970s (late 60s in fact) with companies like Calma and Applicon. They drove the first EDA transition from cutting rubilith, red sticky plastic that was physically cut with X-acto knives, to digitizing the input … Continue reading →

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R.I.P.

Posted on January 20, 2009 by paulmcl

Small EDA companies seem to be falling by the wayside. Over the Christmas break Blaze DFM (insert cremation joke here) and Liga Systems both reached the end of the line. Blaze will certainly get picked up; it has customers and … Continue reading →

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Episode XLIV: a new hope

Posted on January 20, 2009 by paulmcl

It’s inauguration day. Never mind how many of his policies I will disagree with, I still think that it is incredible that the US has gone in 40 years from having segregated water fountains and buses to having a black … Continue reading →

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Open source again

Posted on January 19, 2009 by paulmcl

The blog entry on open source seems to have generated more comments than anything else. Maybe it’s because all the EDA users want software to be free, and all the EDA producers are worried that it might head in that … Continue reading →

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The innovator’s dilemma

Posted on January 19, 2009 by paulmcl

The Innovator’s Dilemma is a book by Harvard business school professor Clayton Christensen. I highly recommend the book both as one of the most stimulating and best-written business books (I know that is an oxymoron, but this is a book … Continue reading →

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