Category Archives: eda industry

Lady Windemere’s FAM

Posted on March 23, 2009 by paulmcl

In Lady Windemere’s Fan, Oscar Wilde wrote that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. EDA companies are a bit like that. They only know the price of their tools. How much … Continue reading →

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Semi equipment vs EDA

Posted on March 19, 2009 by paulmcl

I had lunch with Lance Glasser a couple of weeks ago. He used to run about half of KLA-Tencor’s semiconductor equipment business (and I did some consulting for him back then). We got to discussing why EDA and semiconductor equipment … Continue reading →

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Two million per salesperson

Posted on March 9, 2009 by paulmcl

There is a rule of thumb that all EDA executives know (or have to learn expensively), which is that an EDA company thrives if its sales teams bring in $2M per salesperson. So a medium sized company with, say, 4 … Continue reading →

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No sex before marriage in EDA

Posted on February 27, 2009 by paulmcl

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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We’re driving in a fog

Posted on February 26, 2009 by paulmcl

I went along to what used to be John Cooley’s EDA bigwigs panel and is now Peggy Aycinena’s “Is EDA dead or alive?” I had to keep asking myself am I dead or alive for the first part of the … Continue reading →

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Blazing a trail

Posted on February 24, 2009 by paulmcl

The mystery of whether Blaze DFM had closed down or not is over. It has been acquired by Tela Innovations mainly, it would seem, for the PowerTrim technology that had been licensed by TSMC. A major strategic relationship between Tela … Continue reading →

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Power is the new timing

Posted on February 24, 2009 by paulmcl

In the 1980s, chip design was focused on layout: cramming all those gates into as few chips as possible, trying make use of every square millimeter of silicon. The 1990s were the decade of timing, when all the tools became … Continue reading →

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DFM: Design for manufacturing

Posted on February 17, 2009 by paulmcl

Yesterday I gave a brief overview of lithography and the need for DFM tools to calculate and verify what needs to go on the mask so that we end up with what we want on the die. The need to … Continue reading →

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Survival of the fittest EDA companies

Posted on February 12, 2009 by paulmcl

It’s the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birthday today. Not to mention Abraham Lincoln’s. On a personal note, Darwin went to university at Edinburgh and then Cambridge (the real one in England, not that one near Boston), as did I but … Continue reading →

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EDA: not boring enough

Posted on February 10, 2009 by paulmcl

EDA is fun. Innovation is fun and not many businesses require as much innovation as EDA. Working in an EDA startup in particular was (and still can be) a lot of fun because the ratio of innovation to meetings, company … Continue reading →

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