First there was Fleet Week sponsored by the U.S. Navy. Then there was Engineers Week sponsored by the IEEE. Then there was Semiconductor Week sponsored by Gartner Dataquest and Chartered Semiconductor. Then there was Cooley Week sponsored by Cadence, Magma, and the Fraternity Formerly Known as EDA.

The funny thing is, last week here in the Bay Area, Semiconductor Week and Cooley Week overlapped, and how confusing was that for your average, garden-variety journalist?

Monday and Tuesday, one needed to be at the (tony) Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco to see and be seen up and down the muted halls of the Grand Old Lady as important players in the semiconductor food chain hob-knobbed and shared their wit and wisdom with attendees.

Of course, for those who tend towards the easily amused side of the bell curve, all the keynotes, panels, presentations, and sincerity notwithstanding - the best part of the two days was the Tuesday lunchtime chit-chat between the Gartner Guys and the current CTO of Intel - Patrick Gelsinger of DAC and ITC keynote fame.

Perched on a stool up in front in the Fairmont's Venetian Room, Pat waxed poetic, energetic, visionary and distinctly out-of-the-boxish about all the fabu things that could be accomplished by applying just a little bit of digital savvy to a whole lot of global problems like hunger, war, Grandma's inability to fend for herself, and knowing in advance of opening the front door whether it's the Fuller Brush Man, somebody looking for Halloween candy, or an evil miscreant intending to do harm to you or your kids.

The reason Intel's Gelsinger's chat with Gartner was the most compelling was not revealed, however, until the hour just after lunch. That's when a panel of distinguished experts - actually Gartner described them as "Masterminds" - launched into a cheerfully contentious bit of give-and-take over what's up in the semiconductor industry worldwide.

Is it going up? (and what about automotive?) Is it going down? (and what about automotive?) Are there reasons to go to 65 nanometers and below? (and what about automotive?) Are there reasons to look back lovingly at the good old days of 0.25 micron when transistors had manners and knew how to behave in public - and private for that matter? (and what about automotive?) Is it all copper's fault? (and what about automotive?) Which company loves their customers' customers better? (and what about automotive?) Oh yeah - and How about Those Chinese!

Anyway, you get the gist. You can guess what all was said. But what you couldn't have guessed is that during that panel exchange - by the way, all of these guys (STMIcro's Jean-Philippe Dauvin, Gartner's Martin Reynolds, Intel's Gelsinger, Nokia's Seppo Aaltonen, Samsung's Jon Kang, and Mentor's Wally Rhines) were perched on stools in front as if they were chatting with all of us in the kitchen while we made the salad and they sipped away on a chilled Pinot Grigio - actually Rhines was standing at the podium as he was moderating ...

So what you couldn't have guessed is that midway through the panel discussion, Jon Kang turns to Gelsinger and says (and I paraphrase), You know, Pat. We used to have a CTO just like you. He was always going off on wild schemes and such. Finally we just had to reign him in and bring him back down to earth, back down to reality.

That's when the whole trip to the top of Nob Hill became worth the trouble, the traffic, the overpriced parking, and the years of life taken off the transmission needed to get there.

Because although Pat Gelsinger is nothing if not poetic, energetic, visionary and distinctly out-of-the-boxish - the guy from Samsung seemed to have had him check-mated at that point.

Because it turns out the ultimate question being addressed for those two days at the Fairmont was not if everybody would be wearing 20 sensors at all times to track their vital signs, whether or not there would be enough compute and storage space globally to collect and process all the resulting data, whether or not Grandma would have more years of independent living because of 24x7 connectivity, or whether it's Ghoul or Goblin at the front door - the ultimate question being addressed for those two days at the Fairmont is what are we going to do today:

To make better semiconductors.
To earn more money doing it.
To guarantee that the investors continue to fund it all.
What about automotive?
and ... How about those Chinese!

Hard, down-to-earth considerations about money, technology, and how to do today what needs to get done for tomorrow - not next week, not next month, not next year, not next decade, not next century or next millenium. Apparently we can't afford vision, poetry or energetic fun because:

Semiconductors are Serious.
Semiconductors are Pragmatic.
Semiconductors are Big Business.
Semiconductors are the Stuff of Life.

So, I left San Francisco more knowledgeable for having come, with a better sense of what's unfolding around the world in the semiconductor food chain, and also wondering about just one small detail of the meeting.

Would it be possible next time around, to maybe have a representative of one of those How-about-those-Chinese! business or technology leaders actually sitting on a panel, presenting a paper, or being interviewed on a stool in front of the room? Surely it would be good to hear from one of those guys, since so much hope and hype is swirling around what they're doing today, where they're going tomorrow, and how they perceive next week, next year, next decade, next century, and next millenium.

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Which brings the narrative to the Friday of Semiconductor/Cooley Week.

Of course, in order to get to Friday, we have to bypass the Cadence Users Group meeting in Silicon Valley - where John Cooley Esq. was delivering the keynote address, "The Good, The Bad & The Ugly," to an SRO crowd of 500 fans - the IEEE SoC Conference in Silicon Valley, the EDA Fraternity's Multiple Myeloma Fundraiser in Silicon Valley, and the Chartered Semiconductor Technology Forum in Silicon Valley.

Were these various events important? You betcha! Was it possible to attend the Gartner event, the Cadence event, and the SoC event simultaneously? Nope - although given enough time, I'll bet Pat Gelsinger could come up with the technology needed to solve the problem of how to be in 3 places at once.

En route to Friday, however, it was possible to catch the EDA Fundraiser and the Chartered event.

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By my count, about 200 people showed up at the Capital Club in San Jose on Wednesday night to attend the Multiple Myeloma Fundraiser featuring Cooley, at his second Cooley Week event, auctioning off dinners with some of the higher-profile members of the EDA Fraternity - Rajeev, Wally, Aart, Mike, Gary, the other Mike, Richard, and Brian. (If these names mean nothing to you, you're probably not a member of the Fraternity.)

Of course, the other hot item on the evening's agenda at the Capital Club, besides the auction, was the Outrageous-Bordering-On-Rude Roast that Cooley offered up in honor of all of the distinguished members of the EDA Fraternity who were in attendance at the event.

The fact that Cooley's Roast was Rude was no surprise. The fact that people were offended was downright shocking. The committee that organized the event - Cooley was on the committee - obviously never told John that it would be better to be The Kinder, Gentler Cooley we all know and love during an evening that was intended to honor Sanguinetti, Cancer Research, and Good Works. Instead, Cooley was in rare form, the roast was outrageous, people were entertained, and everybody went home happy - or offended - depending on their take on life.

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Which brings us to the Thursday of Semiconductor/Cooley Week and the Chartered Semiconductor Tech Forum that consumed the entire day at the (not so tony) DoubleTree Hotel in San Jose. A thousand (!!) people took the day off work to be there, to enjoy the speakers, to hear the panel discussions, to partake of the lovely lunch, and to hob and knob in the hallways while also trying to figure out from the specifics of the Chartered message what the larger semiconductor industry is actually up to these days.

Although many people were at the Chartered Event, Cooley was nowhere to be seen, but then he was probably quite spent from his keynote on Tuesday and his efforts on Wednesday on behalf of Multiple Myeloma. No doubt also, he was preparing for his final appearance during Semiconductor/Cooley Week, which was about to unfold the next day.

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Which brings us to noontime on Friday. All 200 of us were wrapping up lunch at the Santa Clara Convention Center, courtesy of Magma Design Automation, because it was the beginning of the second half of the second day of the 2-day Magma Users Group meeting. The panel that was invited in to amuse and amaze the attendees was assembling up on the stage.

The panel included folks from Open Silicon, Mentor Graphics, Magma, Virtual Silicon, PDF Solutions, and of course, John Cooley. Mike Santarini was moderating from the podium in lieu of Richard Goering, and very quickly things were off and running.

Cooley was called on to report out first, from his place at the panel table. He immediately got up out of his chair, moved down to the main floor, over to the screen where the PowerPoint presentations were being projected, and pointed to the names and sizes of all of the PowerPoint presentation files showing up there in anticipation of each of the other speakers' comments.

John pointed to the size of the presentations, turned to the audience, and told everybody (and I paraphrase), "Now you can see why DFM really stands for Dollars for Marketing. None of these guys you're going to hear from after me know how this stuff works, they don't have tools that will solve things for you, and what you're about to hear from all of them is just a bunch of lies."

"They've got huge PowerPoint files with lots of slides, but they won't be doing anything here more than just delivering big marketing messages to all of you. What you need to know is that all of these guys have relationships with the fabs, and in order to satisfy those relationships and in order to sell you $300,000 tools that don't work, they're going have to continue to lie to you about things, and pretend that they've got solutions to the problems of manufacturing and yield at 90 nanometers."

"Now it's true that these problems are hard - I mean, we're still having problems at 130 nanometers, let alone what's happening at 90 nanometers - but the truth is these guys don't have any solid facts to prove that the tools they're selling actually work. Maybe they've got good intentions, but I would be very, very afraid of anything that they're about to tell you, or anything they're trying to sell you."

"I just thought all of you should know."

Then Cooley went got back up on the stage and sat down in his chair.

Hmmm.

Needless to say, the next hour did not include quite as many PowerPoint slides as there might have otherwise been - at least that's my impression. One by one, the other people on the panel in making their presentations, had to address the challenge that Cooley had thrown out to them.

Some of the panelists were amused, some responded calmly, some were by the looks of things, downright angry. By the end of the hour, even Magma CEO Rajeev Madhavan himself, sitting down at a lunch table on the floor among the 200, was engaging Cooley in a back-and-forth conversation about tools, 90 nanometers, truth, and consequences.

All told, it was classic Cooley and the most appropriate way to wrap up Cooley Week that one could imagine. And the funny thing, at the risk of sounding redundant?

That Cooley was rude was no surprise. That people were offended was downright shocking. Perhaps the people who put the panel together, and the folks who agreed to be on the panel with Cooley, should have told him that The Kinder, Gentler Cooley, the one that we all know and love, would have been the more appropriate Cooley to send into this particular event. Instead, Cooley was there in rare form, his comments were outrageous, people were wildly entertained, and everybody went home happy - or offended - depending on their take on life.

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So I left the panel and the Convention Center, and went back to my office, relieved that Semiconductor Week and Cooley Week had finally drawn to a close.

I sat down at my desk and opened my e-mail. Oh my, I thought. Here it looked as if all of the fireworks were over for a while, but no.

Semiconductor/Cooley Week may have drawn to a close, but just in the nick of time, because if my e-mail was any indication, clearly now it was time for ...

Lawsuit Week.

Let the good times roll in the Fraternity Formerly Known as EDA.

et fini.

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September 22, 2004

Peggy Aycinena owns and operates EDA Confidential. She can be reached at peggy@aycinena.com

Copyright (c) 2004, Peggy Aycinena. All rights reserved.