I didn’t bring comments over from the old EDN blog to avoid any ownership squabbles. I clearly own the content I wrote since I didn’t assign it to EDN but the comments are more dubious. Comments are open here, though, so fire away. To minimize spam the first time you comment it will be moderated by me, but after that they should go straight through.

The EDAgraffiti book is still available here or at Amazon. It contains the best of the blog, re-edited and grouped into topics. To find out more either follow the links or click on book in the menu at the top of the page.

I decided to move for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I could get no statistics from EDN about how many people read each blog entry and I know that the number of comments, the only metric I had, was a poor proxy. The number of comments seems to be driven by how controversial a topic is so that the most-commented entries were entries on things like open source.

The other reason was that with Ron Wilson’s departure there wasn’t anyone left at EDN that I knew, and they pretty much stopped covering EDA, so it didn’t seem like a good home anyway. Plus I got tired of wrestling with their various content management systems.

So welcome to the shiny new home of EDAgraffiti.

Paul

This book is an outgrowth from this blog. Although the basis of the book is the original blog entries there is new material and the old material has been extensively revised. Furthermore, I’ve reordered the content so that each chapter covers a different area: Semiconductor, EDA marketing, Investment and so on.

I’ve tried to write the book that I wish I’d been able to read when I started out. Of course it would have been impossible to write back then, but in a real sense this book contains 25 years of experience in semiconductor, EDA and embedded software.

Not many books cover as wide a spectrum of topics as this. I’ve ended up in marketing and executive management but I started out my career in engineering. For a marketing guy I’m very technical. For a technical guy I’m very strong on the business and marketing side. It is an unusual combination. I started in semiconductor, worked in EDA but also in embedded software. I’m a software guy by background but spent enough time in a semiconductor company that I have silicon in my veins.

I certainly won’t claim that this is the only book you need to read, so the end of each chapter has a “bookend” that looks at one or two books that are essential reading for that area, a taster to encourage you to read the book yourself.

There are a few threads that recur through the whole book, leitmotifs that crop up again and again in widely different areas.

• Moore’s Law, of course. But really something deeper which is that semiconductor economics, the fact that transistors have been constantly getting cheaper, is the key to understanding the industry.
• Software differentiation. The reality is that most of the differentiation in most electronic systems is in the software (think iPhone).
• FPGA-based systems. Combining these two trends together, chips are getting too expensive to design for most markets so “almost all” designs are actually software plus FPGA or standard products.
• Power is the limiter in many designs today. We will be able to design big systems but not be able to power up the whole chip at once.
• Multicore hits all these trends. Nobody really knows how to write software for multicore designs with large numbers of cores, nor how to handle the power issues.
• Finally, all the major breakthrough innovations in EDA have come from startup companies, not the big EDA companies. But the exit valuations are so low that no investment is going into EDA startups so it is unclear where the innovation will come from going forward.

The book is available for purchase here. If you are interested in buying in bulk (makes a great giveaway for your best customers at DAC, or for your user-group meeting, or for your sales kickoff) then contact me directly. I can also put a special cover on it with a company logo.

Other people’s opinion on what we said is here:

• Pallab Chatterjee
• Olivier Coudert
• Mike Demler
• Richard Goering
• Grant Martin
• Frank Schirrmeister
• Ed Sperling
• Dylan McGrath

Don’t comment here. Go and comment on either my earlier blog entry or on everyone else’s.

It’s in the Silicon Valley Room at the Doubletree Hotel (2050 Gateway Place, San Jose). That’s up on the second floor by the main staircase. It’s at 3pm on this coming Monday, November 2nd.

See you there!

Firstly, you probably saw that Cadence appointed John Bruggeman as CMO. He was previously CMO at Wind River (recently acquired by Intel). I met him several times when I was at Virtutech since we were both in the space of embedded software development. We even persuaded him to come and give an opening speech at our sales kickoff one year.

Prior to Wind River, John was at Mercury Interactive (along with Ken Klein the CEO of Wind River). There he came up with the concept of Business Technology Optimization, or BTO, as an umbrella theme for what they did. At Wind River, he tried to reposition the company as more than just embedded with the mantra of Device Software Optimization or DSO. If you were at the Embedded System Conference any time around then, you couldn’t but notice the ten foot high white “D,” “S” and “O.” So what will it be this time? EDA, boring. Electronic System Optimization, that’s hot. ESO, you read it here first!

**

A couple of days after I wrote about mobile payments, Nokia announced Nokia Money targeted at just that space, along with a company Obopay (which is partially owned by Nokia).

And by the way, a pet peeve, Nokia is pronounced with slight emphasis on the first syllable and not with emphasis on the “i” as many people say it. While on that topic, going back to talking about learning Chinese, Beijing (bei=north, jing=capital) is pronounced with a “j” as in “jug” not a sort of harsh “sh”.

**

Going back to Japan, I accused the handset makers of being too inwardly focused and competing only with each other. It looks like they are going to solve that problem by merging them. NEC, Hitachi and Casio are looking to merge their handset operations to create the second largest handset vendor in Japan (Sharp, surprisingly, is number one).

**

I talked earlier about Apple’s strength with iPhone, not so much in volume but in profit. Apparently Apple had (in 1H09) 1.9% of handset unit volume, 8% of revenue and a whopping 32% (almost a third) of all the profit. The numbers are a little distorted since both Sony-Ericsson and Motorola lost money (so reducing the denominator). If we take them out of the equation, they still have 25% of the profits of the profitable handset vendors.

**

Magma came out with surprisingly good results, beating street estimates. Revenue was $28.8M and cash-flow was positive. I recently talked with someone who told me that their synthesis was now better than Cadence or Synopsys but place and route was not (yes, I know that is anecdote and not data). Of course SP&R is a horse race, and there are still too many horses with Synopsys, Cadence, Magma, Mentor/Sierra, Atoptech and others. It is a marathon not a sprint.

Firstly, something that I already knew but which I feel much more strongly now. There are two separate parts to writing, working out what you are going to say and putting those thoughts into words. I can write really fast if I’ve already sorted out what point I’m trying to make. And in a blog entry of a few hundred words you can really only make one or two points. If I haven’t sorted out what I want to say, then starting to write is a really bad way of addressing that. Driving for 30 minutes with the radio off, or taking a shower, or having a coffee are all much better and a lot less frustrating.

One thing people often ask me is how long I spend writing a piece. The answer is about 45 minutes or an hour (assuming I already know what I’m going to say, but you knew that). A few times people have suggested an idea to me and I’ve got a blog item emailed out to get feedback from them within an hour. On a plane, I can write 3 or 4 entries on a battery for my MacBook.

How do I decide what to write on? I try and mix up subjects since a whole week of, say, finance would be boring. But some of the “boring” stuff like sales and finance is really important. EDA startups in particular usually get the technology right. It is the non-technical stuff that lets them down. I suppose I write the stuff I wish I’d known when I started in EDA.

The biggest frustration with blogging like this is that I don’t get much feedback. All sorts of people tell me that they read EDAgraffiti when they meet me. Very few people think to email me or to leave a comment on the blog. Reed has the policy of not letting page-view data outside of the company, and since I’m not an employee I don’t get to see (maybe it’s the same for the internal people outside management, I don’t know). So I don’t know how many people read EDAgraffiti, and I don’t know what type of people read EDAgraffiti. I don’t know which entries get read the most and which get nearly ignored.

I also get asked why I do this blog. You might assume I’m paid to do this but you’d be wrong. I do it partially because I enjoy it, partially because it is fun to give back to the industry some of what I’ve learned over the years, partially because it doesn’t do any harm to be more widely known in the industry and also because it helps as an advertisement of my knowledge to encourage people to engage me for consulting contracts (I’m available!). Although I’m not sure my blogging persona which someone described to me as “grouchy old man” is especially appealing from that point of view. EDA is more challenging right now than in the past and it doesn’t help to pretend that this is not so.

Anyway I have a favor to ask you, especially if you are regular reader. In fact two. First, go and vote for EDAgraffiti on Denali’s “next top blogger” competition. It will only take a couple of seconds. Secondly, send me an email with a couple of lines saying what your background is (design engineer, EDA marketing, semiconductor executive, whatever) and what topics that I’ve been covering you find the most interesting.

My email is paul®greenfolder.com (but change the ® to @).

Also, since it is months ago I last mentioned this, I often pre-announce blog entries and other stuff on Twitter, so you can follow paulmclellan there or else search on “edagraffiti”.

But anyway, a secret that some of you already know since you follow me is that blog entries get pre-announced there, and sometimes other stuff.

So if you want to be ahead of the curve, follow me on Twitter. My username is paulmclellan. And while on the subject, my email is paul at greenfolder dot com.