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Category Archives: engineering
Magma’s new P&R and re-building the foundations
One of the important but often unrecognized aspects of engineering is re-building the infrastructure underneath key design tools. Sometimes this gives a new desirable capability but often a lot of the effort is simply to modernize the code base so … Continue reading
Posted in eda industry, engineering
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Pat Pistilli: the first cell library, the first printed label, and more
Pat Pistilli is this years Kaufman Award winner. I was out of the country for the award dinner so I didn’t attend but I talked to Pat earlier today. Pat, who was at Bell Labs, started DAC (then called SHARE, … Continue reading
Posted in eda industry, engineering
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The VHDL and Verilog story
I put a blog entry up on the Oasys blog about their new release, which is the first to support VHDL. But a couple of people told me it was a nice recounting of history so I decided to put … Continue reading
Posted in eda industry, engineering
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Barriers to entry
When I looked around at DAC last month (well, the month before last, what happened to August?) one thing that is in some ways surprising is that, given the poor growth prospects of the EDA industry, there are so many … Continue reading
Posted in engineering, investment
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Application engineers
Application engineers are the unsung heroes of EDA. They have to blend the technical skills of designers with the interpersonal skills of salespeople. Most AEs start out as design engineers (or software engineers for the embedded market). But not all … Continue reading
Posted in engineering, sales
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EDA on the iPhone
One thing that I’ve done in the last few months during my involuntary unemployment, other than writing this blog, has been to teach myself how to program the iPhone. Despite having been in marketing for over a decade, my background … Continue reading
Posted in eda industry, engineering
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Emotional engineers
People sometimes say that salespeople are emotional, unlike engineers. I think what they mean is that salespeople are (stereotypically) extrovert so if you mess with them they’ll make a noise about it. Whereas engineers are introvert and will just brood … Continue reading
Posted in engineering, management
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Another look at internal development
I’ve talked before about internal development, by which I mean semiconductor companies developing their own tools. I just don’t think that it is going to happen in a big way. In the early 1980s VLSI design techniques were being disseminated … Continue reading
Posted in engineering, semiconductor
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Test cases
I talked recently about customer support and how to handle it. One critical aspect of this is the internal process by which bugs get submitted. The reality is that if an ill-defined bug comes in, nobody wants to take the … Continue reading
Posted in engineering
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Why is EDA so buggy?
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
Posted in eda industry, engineering
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