Category Archives: marketing

No sex before marriage in EDA

In most businesses, every company doesn’t feel the need to make every product that it sells. When you buy a car from General Motors, they don’t make the ABS system themselves, they buy it from Delphi or from Bosch. When … Continue reading

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Ferrari vs Formula-1

It used to be received wisdom that the way to get a good design flow was for a semiconductor company to purchase best-in-class point tools and then integrate them together themselves. I think there were two reasons for this. First, … Continue reading

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The arrogance of ESL

ESL, or electronic system level design, is a catchall term for tools above the level of RTL. There are two primary aspects to this: synthesis and verification of IC designs from representations higher than RTL (usually untimed C or System-C); … Continue reading

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“The tragedy of the commons” and EDA

The tragedy of the commons is an article published in Science magazine in 1968 by Garrett Hardin. It has since become very well known and is applicable widely when resources are shared without a market. The canonical example is common … Continue reading

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Why did EDA have a hardware business model?

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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Why EDA differs from ERP in more than two letters

What is it about EDA that makes it different from other software businesses? When the CFO of Texas Instruments buys Oracle or SAP he or she doesn’t study what algorithms they use in their relational database. EDA purchasers are the … Continue reading

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Intel only needs one copy

It is obvious that companies make money in EDA only if they sell enough software. One rule of thumb is that EDA companies thrive if each salesperson brings in $2M per year, and they don’t if they only bring in … Continue reading

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City Slickers marketing

I have done a fair number of consulting projects for EDA startups and a lot of them start out with what I like to call “City Slickers marketing”, named after the movie City Slickers. For those of you who have … Continue reading

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