Monthly Archives: March 2009

Semi equipment vs EDA

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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Standards

I was once at a standardization meeting many years ago when a friend of mine leaned over and said, “I tend to be against standards, they just perpetuate other people’s mistakes.” I think this is really a criticism of standardizing … Continue reading

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Japan: lost in introspection

There has been a lot of speculation about what will happen to the Japanese electronics companies, and in particular their semiconductor divisions, all of which are bleeding money. If you visit Japan you get some idea of the problem. Everything … Continue reading

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Guest blog: Kathryn Kranen

Kathryn Kranen is the CEO of Jasper Design Automation. In Q4 last year, to the amazement of anyone watching, they closed a round of funding. More surprising still, they didn’t simply raise money from their existing investors, they brought on … Continue reading

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Relevance lost

If you are at all interested in accounting I recommend the book Relevance Lost by Thomas Johnson and Robert Kaplan. I think it is a fascinating background to how we ended up with the kind of finance departments we have, … Continue reading

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Internal development

One potential change to the way chips are designed is for EDA to become internal to the semiconductor companies. In the early days of the industry it always was. Until the early 1980s there wasn’t really any design automation. There were … Continue reading

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Multicore

Earlier I discussed power in integrated circuits. As most people know, power is the main reason that PC processors have had to move away from single core chips with increasingly fast clock rates and towards multi-core chips. Embedded chips are … Continue reading

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Guest blog: Mark Gogolewski

Today’s guest blog is from Mark Gogolewski, who is one of the founders of Denali, famous for parties memory controller and other IP. Denali was founded 14 years ago and was financed on the sweat-equity of its founders who initially … Continue reading

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Two million per salesperson

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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Twitpitches

Can you pitch your company in a tweet? This is known as a twitpitch. In fact it is a great discipline if not always practical: can you compelling summarize your value proposition in 140 characters or less? Never mind sitting … Continue reading

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