The alternative approach is essentially to make a speech. The real content is in what you say. The slides then should be graphical backup (pictures, graphs, key points) to what you are saying. Watch a Steve Jobs keynote from MacWorld (example) to see this type of presentation done really well, or presentations from TED (but beware, not all of them have slides at all).

But just like Steve Jobs or the TED presenters, to carry this off well you need to rehearse until you have your speech perfect, either basically memorizing it or doing it from notes. Whatever you do, don’t write it out word for word and read it. The slides are not going to help you remember what to say, they are another complication for you to make sure is synchronized with your speech. So rehearse it without the slides until you have that perfect. Then rehearse it with the slides. Then rehearse it some more. Like a good actor, it takes a lot of repetition to make ad libs look so spontaneous.

This approach will not work presenting to foreigners who don’t speak fluent English. There is simply not enough context in the visuals alone, and your brain has a hard time processing both visuals and speech in a second language. If you know a foreign language somewhat, but are not bilingual, then watch the news in that language. It is really hard work, and you already know the basic story since they cover the same news items as the regular network news.

If you are giving a keynote speech, then this is the ideal style to use. You don’t, typically, have a strong "demand" like you do when presenting to investors (fund my company) or customers (buy my product). Instead you might want to intrigue the audience, hiding the main point until late in the presentation. So instead of opening with a one-slide version of the whole presentation, you should try and find an interesting hook to get people’s interest up. Preferably not that Moore’s Law is going to make our lives harder since I think we’ve all heard that one.

I find the most difficult thing to achieve when giving speeches to large rooms of people is to be relaxed, and be myself. If I’m relaxed then I’m a pretty good speaker. If I’m not relaxed, not so much. Also, my natural speed of speaking is too fast for a public speech, but again if I force myself to slow down it is hard to be myself. This is especially bad if presenting to foreigners since I have to slow down even more.

I also hate speaking from behind a fixed podium. Sometimes you don’t get to choose, but when I do I’ll always take a wireless lavalier (lapel) mike over anything else, although the best ones are not actually lapel mikes but go over your ear so that the mike comes down the side of your head. That leaves my hands free, which makes my speaking better. Must be some Italian blood somewhere.

Another completely different approach, difficult to carry off, is what has become known as the Lawrence Lessig presentation style, after the Stanford law professor who originated it. An example is here where he talks about copyright and gets through 235 slides in 30 minutes, or watch a great presentation on identity with Dick Hardt using the same approach here. Each slide is on the screen for sometimes just fractions of a second, maybe containing just a single word. I’ve never dared to attempt a presentation like this. The level of preparation and practice seems daunting. I’d be interested if anyone else has any experience of trying this.

Most problems with presentations come about from making the presentation serve too many purposes. They are what will be on the screen for the audience to see, they may be your own way of keeping track of what you need to say, and they may be a handout that is meant to stand on its own for people who missed the presentation. The problem is that the first function, adding to what you are saying, requires different content from the other two, reminding you what to say or serving as a substitute for what you say.

The reality is that your audience can only concentrate on one verbal thing at a time. If you put a lot of text on your slide then your audience will be reading it and not listening to you. You need to decide which is going to win. You cannot have it both ways and make a detailed content-rich speech accompanied by a detailed content-rich presentation. If the content is identical in both places, it is very boring. If it is different, it is very confusing. There are even studies that show that if what you say is all on the slides, then you are better either giving a speech (without slides), or handing out the slides (without saying anything).

The rest of this entry assumes that you are doing the most common form of hi-tech presentation, where a good part of the content is on the slides. When you deliver it you should emphasize the key points but don’t go over every line. Instead, tell anecdotes that back up the dry facts on the screen. Personalize them as much as you can to make them more powerful and memorable. This approach works well for presentations that you are not going to rehearse extensively, or where someone else may be the presenter. If it’s not on the slide it doesn’t exist.

When putting together a presentation, like any sort of writing, the most important thing is to have a clear idea in your own mind of what you want to say. So the first rule is to write the one slide version of the presentation first. If you can’t do this then you haven’t decided what point you are trying to make, or what your company’s value proposition is, or how to position your product. Until you get this right, your presentation is like a joke where you have forgotten the punch line. Once you have this, then this should be very close to the first slide of your eventual presentation. After all, it is the most important thing so you should open with it; and probably close with it too.

When you have the one slide version worked out you can go to 3 or 4 slides. Get that right before you go to the full-length presentation. When you expand the few points from those few slides to a full-length presentation, make sure that you presentation “tells a story”. Like a good story, it should have a theme running through it, not just be a collection of random slides. How many slides? No more than one every 2 minutes max. If you have 20 minutes to speak, 10 slides or so.

In the consulting work I do, I find that not getting these two things right are very common. Presentations where the basic message is not clear, and presentations that do not flow from beginning to end. Not to mention people trying to get through 20 slides in 10 minutes.

If you are presenting to foreigners who don’t speak good English, you must make sure that everything important is on the slides since you can assume they will not catch everything that you say (maybe anything you say). You will also need to avoid slang that non-Americans might not understand (although you’d be surprised how many baseball analogies Europeans use these days without knowing what they really mean in a baseball context). I remember the people at a Japanese distributor being confused by “low-hanging fruit.” They thought it must have some sort of sexual connotation!

So make sure you know the main point, and make sure that the presentation tells a story that starts from and finishes with the main point.

Oh, and here is another rule of thumb. Print out your slides. Put them on the floor. Stand up. If you can’t read them the type is too small. Or go with Guy Kawasaki’s rule of using a minimum font size at least half the age of the oldest person in the room.

Analogies are a great way of explaining things.  You probably heard that movies are often pitched in a ten-second bite “It’s like xxx only yyy.” For instance Alien: “It’s like Jaws, only in space.” Or Chicken Run: “It’s like The Great Escape only with clay chickens.”

Investors can be pitched this way too. They typically don’t really understand the technology they are investing in so it’s no good talking about how great your modifications to Kernighan-Lin are for next generation 32nm placement in a restricted design rule environment. Better to say “It’s like Silicon Perspective but taking modern process limitations into account.”

When I was at Ambit, we had a product called PKS (physically knowledgeable synthesis) which was the first synthesis tool that took physical layout into account in timing. But it was hard to explain to people why this was important back then, everyone was used to synthesis with wire-models and didn’t really understand the limitations. I found that the best way to explain it was that it was like trying to find the distance you’d have to travel to visit 4 cities in the US. It clearly makes a big difference if you know the cities are in LA, Miami and Seattle, as opposed to LA, Phoenix and Las Vegas. If you know nothing about where they are, which is the wireload model case, all you can do is use some sort of average and say it is 1500 miles. Always. This analogy also served to overcome the objection that we were not using the precise placement that would end up after physical design. If the cities are LA, Miami and Seattle, it doesn’t matter that much that the Seattle visit was actually to Portland; it’s close enough and a lot better than assuming Portland, Maine. I found that with this analogy people would immediately understand the reason for what we were doing and the limitations in the old approach.

Another analogy I like is in multi-core. Forget all the programming but just focus on the infrastructure. Everything assumes, or rather assumed, a certain model of programming: the programming languages, the hardware, the operating systems., the way programmers wrote code assuming that future computers would be more powerful not less It’s like containerization. The whole shipping infrastructure of the world is built on a standard sized container. Multi-core is as if someone suddenly said that you couldn’t have container trucks any more, for each big truck you used to have you now get a dozen FedEx delivery vans. In fact you can have millions of them, they are so cheap and getting cheaper. The trouble is that the infrastructure doesn’t work like that. The carrying capacity of millions of FedEx trucks might be much more than the container trucks, but the legacy stuff all comes in containers. It just doesn’t do to look only at the total carrying capacity.

A company I’m on the board of, Tuscany Design Automation, has a product for structured placement. In essence, the design expert gives some manual guidance. But people are worried at how difficult this is since they’ve never used a tool that made it easy. It really is hard in other tools where all you get is to edit a text file and don’t get any feedback on what you’ve done. The analogy I’ve come up with is that it is like computer typesetting before Macs and PageMaker and Word. You had text-based systems where you could put arcane instructions and make it work but it was really hard and best left to specialists. Once the whole desktop publishing environment came along it turned out that anyone (even great aunt Sylvia) could produce a newsletter or a brochure. It was no longer something that had to be left to typesetting black-belts. And so it is with structured placement. Once you make it easy, and give immediate feedback, and people can see what they are doing then anyone can do it.

Ladies and gentlemen…

Moore’s law…blah, blah, blah. Show generic Moore’s law slide. New challenges. Scary.

Design gap…blah, blah, blah. Show generic design gap slide. Must close the gap. Scary.

Chips are getting bigger, more physical effects are becoming important, wavelength used for lithography is not changing, engineering productivity must increase.

The three mega-trends: drive up the level of abstraction for greater productivity, drive down the level of detail since second-order effects are becoming first-order, and increase integration to improve productivity.

So far everything has been completely generic. You could have given the same speech a decade ago. If you did, it is a good idea to at least update the years on your generic slides so they don’t finish five years in the past. Now it’s time to get vaguely specific. You’ll need to update the rest of the keynote at least every process node. That’s only every couple of years so not too much work.

Talk about big issues of the day that affects everyone. Power is hot (or perhaps that should be cool) or how about process variability, or impact of new lithography restrictions. If you talk about power, talk about how power format standards (or at least the one you support) will make everything straightforward. Don’t forget how committed you are to standards.

Drive up level of abstraction so that front-end designers are more productive.  Talk about the architectural level; nobody is quite sure what it is but it is big picture so wave your hands a lot. Maybe talk unconvincingly about need to take embedded software into account. The audience knows nothing about it but they have whole groups doing it, and they are bigger than the IC groups, so it must be important. Talk about importance of IP and doing design using much larger blocks. This is a good time to talk about standards again and how committed you are to them. System-C and transactional-level modeling are good names to drop. Verification is 60% of cost of design. Tradeoffs need to be done at architectural level for greatest effect, later in the design cycle is too, uh, late.

Drive down level of detail so that we take into account new physical and manufacturing effects we used to be able to ignore. “You can’t ignore the physics any more” makes it sound like you didn’t forget all the physics you learned in college. Designers need to worry about process variability and will need statistical timing tools to worry with. And after thirty years of pretty much putting what we want onto masks we are not going to be able to do that any more. Good moment to have scary pictures of the difference in how layout looks on the screen to the mask to the silicon.

Need for greater productivity. Next generation databases. If yours is open, argue about why this is public spirited, sustainable and green. If yours is closed, argue about how that enables your tools to be more optimized and efficient. Everyone needs more integrated tools. Nothing is fast enough so your tools will all be multi-threaded one day. Soon. You hope. Flows are important. Unless you only have point tools in which case talk about how best-in-class point tools are even better than flows.

You are short on time so slip in a quick mention of manufacturing test. Who knows anything about it? But chips have to be tested so talk about scan. Or BIST. Or ScanBIST. Then there’s packaging and printed circuit boards. They are probably important too, but everyone in the audience is a chip designer. Best not to think too much about them.

They don’t design FPGAs either, but good to mention them to show you understand how widely they are used. But there’s no money in EDA for FPGAs so best to gloss over exactly what capabilities you have.

Wrap it up and get off the stage. We are working hard on all these areas. We are your partner for the future.