Comédie-EDA Cooley's Bigwig Panel at DVCon 2005
************************************** Wednesday, February 16th Peggy, I can't understand why people are so critical of Mike Fister for not making many appearances. Why are people so negative in EDA just because somebody won't come out and speak? Why would you infer something negative versus something positive? Why are people so concerned about what somebody else is doing? Why aren't they focused on their own agenda? And why is there so much cattiness in EDA that people have to project what's happening in a company based on whether or not the CEO shows up for things? Mike Fister is from a different culture. When he's ready to speak, he'll go to Wall Street first. That's the way a $1 billion Fortune 500 company behaves. If you look at Nike or Intel - and Mike Fister is from Intel! - when they make a strategic announcement of what they're doing, it's to Wall Street and usually at a major conference. Certainly, if you look at it from the position of corporation communications, that's how to make a $1 billion company or bigger. Also, why are people trying so hard to compare the three different CEOs in EDA? It's like trying to compare apples to apples, but they're not all apples. They're an apple, an orange, and a pear – but all of those are hardwood trees. People don't compare Aart and Wally. So why are they comparing Mike to the other two? Regards, Anon ************************************** Wednesday, February 16th Dear Peggy, I'm, trying to figure out what was the purpose of the DVCon Big Wigs panel. I mean, why did I go? To see the EDA movers and shakers? Gary and Rajeev notwithstanding, the panel might more properly have been called "Lieutenants of Big Wigs panel, with a couple of second tier CEOs added in." Who will show up from the big three next year? Sergeants of the industry? To hear funny skits? I have to admit, the Sierra CEO did a good job playing into the staged first question about the all-Indian ethnic nature of his company's customer base. His slides deservedly got a good laugh from the crowd when he compared the ethnic makeup of his customer base with the ethnic makeup of the panel. So if this was the purpose, let's see the moderator script the entire hour, so we get some high quality laughs throughout the panel. To see EDA's Big Wigs ambushed by questions from the EDA user community? Sure seemed possible since the questions were phrased in such a loaded semantic fashion that the panelists had to start off by defending their companies' action before explaining the reasoning behind the action. In the end, it's hard to tell just what purpose the DVCon Big Wigs panel served. We didn't get much insight into where the EDA industry was going. Yes, there was decent discussion about SystemC and synthesis, and 90nm tapeouts, but nothing earth shattering. Maybe it was because we didn't have the real Big Wigs there. Maybe it's because the panel had no enlightening purpose. I kept thinking that this was the once a year chance to get the EDA Big Wigs up in front of the industry, so the engineers can throw figurative pies in their faces. If this DVCon panel was a movie, I'll bet Ebert and Roeper would have given this two thumbs down. It was a panel in search of a theme, comprised of overlong answers from: one of the big three's technical chiefs; a SystemC vendor pushing the success of his products; and the CEO of the number 4 player, who did speak from an industry point of view and didn't come off as shrill and acerbic this year. A panel full of belches and flatulence signifying...well, what did the panel achieve? It kind of felt like the movie "Rocky II," a much reduced rehash of the original "Rocky." Will we see the DVCon version of "Rocky III" next year? Just call me, Anonymous ************************************** Comédie-EDA Tuesday, February 15th
This year, the DVCon 2005 Bigwigs Panel was no exception. There were outrageous questions, pointed jabs from the audience, a lot of raucous jokes – mostly at the expense of one panelist or another – and a nice little flame out here and there. And as always – the principle players in this little Comédie-EDA were dressed to the nines – Cooley in his polo shirt conducting from the podium and the participants themselves lined up along the table on stage like seven peas in a pod – all in dark jackets, light shirts, and nicely pressed ties. Given how little creativity goes into the costuming for this annual melodrama, it's amazing how much creativity emerges from the improvisational theater of it all. John started by running down the list of panelists. He ticked off the names of the folks sitting to his right: Rajeev Madhavan, CEO at Magma Design Automation John played it straight with most of the introductions. He did, however, embellish Vucurevich's introduction with the caveat: "Ted's becoming the on-demand stand-in for Mike Fister here, there, and everywhere." That little jab, not surprisingly, got the afternoon off to a lively start with a round of spontaneous cheering, stomping, and applause. If I were Ted, I would have been highly flattered. John did not choose, however, to comment on the fact the Verisity CEO Moshe Gavrielov had mysteriously dropped off the panel, replaced by everybody's favorite EDA editor – Gabe Moretti. Gabe was probably more interesting as a participant, anyway. When you're the CEO of a company that's being acquired by another company, erring on the side of silence, is always the better side of valor. Gabe, on the other hand, is nobody's fool and speaks his mind clearly, honestly – doesn't having his hands tied by corporate policy or legal defensive ends. So John, having warmed up his audience, launched into the EverythingEDA. He asked Madhani why he didn't have any Indian customers? Madhani, who obviously had seen the proposed questions for the panelists on John's site earlier in the day, leaped over to the overhead projector and put up his prepared foils. He had pie charts to show the ethnicities of his employees and pie charts to show the nationalities of his customers, He pointed out that with 24% Indian employees in his company, he had one point less in the ethnicity category than the panel itself, which he said was 25% Indian. He said, "Ethnicity's not important, but to answer this question – I had to go cube by cube among my employees and ask, 'What are you?'" You could ask why he had to respond to an inane question at all, but the audience reveled in the naughtiness of it – on account of sex, politics, religion, and race are definite taboos at dinner parties and technical panels. But, of course, nothing's ever taboo on a Cooley panel, which is of course why everybody comes. So John said, "So, Pravin – you don't have an Indian strategy at all?" Pravin said, "Okay – so clearly, we're going to get dinged both ways." John said, "What, you don't understand the culture?" Pravin said, "Right – I've just been here too long, man." John said his next question was for Gary Smith. "Gary, why are your numbers such crap?" Of course, besides the taboos on sex, lies, videotapes, and race – John was violating the taboo of ever challenging the veracity of Dataquest numbers. After all, this is bible – and the stuff by which the entire EDA industry navigates its course, year to year. Gary's responded: "What? Did I offend some marketing weenie? I mean – John, you yourself use my numbers." Wow – that brought the house down! John said, "Yeah, but why do you parse the tools into such weird subsets?" To which Gary responded: "Well, people buy the report. You should buy the report too, John, if you're interested. Maybe then, you'd understand." After the laughter, Gary had lots more to say. He offered a detailed discussion of simulation, hardware, ESL, software, algorithmic engines, Celoxica, silicon performance, Simlink, the co-paradigm of hardware/software, concurrent compilers. In fact, his answer was so detailed a response to the broadside attack, that John and his audience stopped listening. They didn’t want facts. They wanted blood and humiliation. What fun was this? So John moved on. John said, "Rajeev? Was it a bad idea after all, to send that letter to Synopsys?" Rajeev Madhavan surprised everybody (not) by saying that his lawyers had advised him that he wasn’t free to comment on anything legal. That meant, of course, that he wasn't going to offer up any trash talk about Synopsys. But he did say that they'll always do what they have to do to protect their IP, and that this industry has to turn down the number of fights they have with each other, and that Magma is proud that they themselves have never started a litigation, and they hope they never have to. He ended with: "All Wall Street sees when they look at all of us is a bunch of people fighting on the least provocation". That was boring. We were all there to see a brawl, so who invited Rajeev? So, John said, "Antun?" Antun Domic said, "Take a look at it from Synopsys' side. We’ve had only one serious litigation – Nassda. And anyone could see that we had an extremely strong case there. What's happening there will be in the best interest of the customers. Synopsys did proceed to defend its position after we received the Magma letter. But nonetheless, these two cases do not constitute a large number of litigations." The audience groaned. Whether it was because Antun was right, or Antun was in denial, or Antun's lawyers had clearly given Antun permission to speak was not clear. In any case, Rajeev responded that he'd seen all he needed to see about excessive litigations when he was involved at Ambit, and that the idea that there aren't a lot of litigations in EDA is not true and violates of all the we hold sacred in EDA – which is that we litigate too much. Everybody in the audience seemed to agree. John asked Jacob Jacobbson to comment. Jacob said, "We want to side with Rajeev, because EDA does indeed have the image of being very, very patent infringement happy. The question is how to sort things out without a legal fight. Our image here in EDA is definitely tarnished." Mike Santarini, newly minted EDA editor at EDN, piped up from his front-row seat in the audience. "Well, maybe people in EDA ought to stop stealing stuff if you want to stop seeing so many lawsuits." Yes, sir! That's what the audience wanted! Blood. The audience stomped, hooted, and hollered.
There were more exchanges at this point between John and Jacob, which allowed Jacob to wax poetic about verification, SystemC, and behavioral design. He ended his musings with, "We can be successful where Synopsys can not." John said, "But even Mentor has abandoned SystemC – so why persevere?" Jacob said, "Abandoning SystemC is really weird. Especially when the momentum for the language is clearly accelerating." Then he too leaped over to the overhead projector and put up a foil that indicated there'd been 200,000 (that's two hundred thousand!) downloads of the free SystemC simulator. John – The Knight in Shining Armor for EverythingHDL – was ready: "Come on, Jacob. Are you asking us to believe there are 200,000 SystemC customers in the world?" Jacob said, "Yes! Those are 200,000 true downloads of the SystemC simulator – and 7000 people have taken our class so far, which is in itself a sign of the momentum." He went on a bit more, but Mentor raised a hand. Robert Hum said, "Mentor has not abandoned SystemC." John said, "Yeah, but for synthesis? You don't do it. I know 'cause I phoned up Mentor and asked." Robert said, "We've got CatapultC working in the synthesis area, but nobody wants SystemC in the state space. You don't need SystemC to do that." John asked Ted Vucurevich into the fray. "Ted?" Ted said, "The picture's bigger than just synthesis. People are saying that you've got to get the software guys into the conversation. Unfortunately, this requires breaking with the past and trying to sort things out. How to get from point A to point B is the question, plus everybody wants one language. But, we need synthesis for hardware and we need synthesis for software. And we have to look at the adoption rates and the manufacturabilitiy. So, I would be very careful around anyone who says they're already using SystemC." So Antun replied: "SystemC is finding its place at higher levels of description. To use it as an HDL is not warranted. To try and put on one more language to do RTL synthesis doesn't add value. For companies like Forte – it may pan out. It may not." Okay – so, Mentor, Cadence, and Synopsys had had their moment … now for the editor & analyst. Gabe jumped in before Gary could advocate: "We're still in the pioneering stages of the ESL market, but we're having difficulty defining ESL. Look at Gary. He's redefining the term every 6 months because there's a demand from people who want to design at higher levels of abstraction. But, the EDA vendors are trying to respond to the demand by just reworking the tool chain. They want to live in the middle." There wasn't a huge response to Gabe's comments. After all, for the bulk of that audience have careers and capabilities invested in EverythingHDL, so why should they celebrate anybody or anything that might upset the EverythingHDL apple cart? John changed the subject. "Rajeev and Robert – are you pissed that you missed buying Verisity?" Excellent! More sass! More humiliation! More blood! The audience perched back up on the edge of their chairs. Rajeev said, "I can't comment. But I congratulate Moshe." That seemed a little useless. Moshe wasn't there. But, once again, John missed the chance to talk to the elephant in the middle of the room – why Moshe was a no-show. Meanwhile, Rajeev wasn't done: "The Cadence acquisition will bring parity to the industry. Verisity needed better channels and Cadence can supply that." Robert, however, said, "I didn't realize this was a rumor mill." Gosh, where's he been? Has he never seen The EDA Improvisational Theater & Rumor Troupe in action before? John was not dissuaded: "Are you telling me that Mentor didn't bid for Verisity?" In the time-honored tradition of anyone who ever sat before Joseph McCarthy, Robert replied: "I can't remember." Excellent. Blood flowing freely. The room was awash in laughter and irreverence. Robert said, "Testbench-based verification has been in the industry for a long time. There's all sorts of stuff built around that. People are saying that testbenches are a fact of life, they have to run them to make things work. Verisity only has 12 percent of the total available market. Only 12 percent are using e or Specman. The rest of the industry is saying no to the technology. But the industry needs to standardize things. Standards drive adoption. We want to standardize things. The industry wants to standardize things. The battlefront has moved beyond testbenches. Now, asserting based verification, coverage-based verification, and formal techniques will be where the new products will come from. For Verisity, however – we're happy that they have a home. But we're not particularly torqued about it." John yawned and said: "Ted? Are you getting squishy? You're saying nothing." Ted smiled: "We've had 50 or 60 acquisitions in 12 years. This one is interesting, but so have the others been interesting. We wanted to make sure that this was the right thing to do and it was. We're gaining an excellent Israeli team – and we saw the chance to integrate great people and great technology." John would not be put off: "Specifically, Ted. Are you going to kill e?" Ted invoked Axis, Palladium, Incisive, customers, simulators, emulators, and bottom lines. John yawned again, and allowed Rajeev to jump in and clear things up: "I was active in OVI when VHDL and Verilog were fighting." Rajeev said there would be similar dynamics while people sorted out between the different verification languages, but he was sure that eventually there would be a single language that would emerge to save the day. Nothing was cleared up, however, so Gabe said: "In 5 years as an editor, I've seen that the people in the Palladium group would rather commit Hari Kari than admit the technology was no good." So Ted said, "Axis starts as an accelerator for simulation. Palladium is inside the accelerator for emulation. They're competing for design space, but both are excellent technologies that can drive the market. Eventually things will ferret themselves out." Ferrets are good, so John turned the screws, once again, on Antun. John, "Antun? How many customers have you lost to BlastChip? Antun was sure: "Very few. There's lots of talk about other options for synthesis, but we've also seen dramatic improvement in Design Compiler. But yes, it's true – we do see some competition." John: "What about people posting better results with Get2Chip?" Antun: "We're never going to have 100 percent of the customers. But we're extremely confident in DC. Our numbers continue to be excellent." Rajeev got in a marketing pitch: "The job you need to do in synthesis is very out of date. The value is going down rapidly because much of the decision must be made at the backend. Now it’s about how much should be done at the front end versus what’s done at the back end. That means a new flow and a new opportunity." Antun was not intimidated: "We must be careful with things you say and about what can be done. We agreed 5 years ago – things change and everyone needs to do more. But you have to be very careful here. Astro, Primetime – we have seen what changes. Customers have seen this in many cases. And synthesis – Synopsys or not – must be used to its best opportunity. But, I do agree we need to do more." The audience slumped in their chairs, while the battle for hearts and minds continued. Rajeev was still in the zone: "You don’t tape out a netlist. You tape out a GDS II. None of the other things matter. As time passes, what matters is how do we maximum first silicon? We’ve had a front-end tool and a back-end tool, so there’s been two strings. Can we to one? Absolutely, but there's inertia! And the move from front end to back end won’t happen overnight." More minutes ensued as the technology banter zigzagged back and forth – all in fun, at least for those sitting at the panelist's table. Clearly neither Ted, nor Antun, nor Rajeev were going to back down. That was a good thing, because the audience loved the rancor. Probably for the same reason that people like to go to cockfights – they’re a little tasteless, and a lot lively. John called in the arbiters: "Gary? Gabe? Is there any truth in anything these guys are saying?" Gabe started: "Synthesis tools have become content sensitive. But, Gary and I are wondering – the ASIC counts are going down, yet apparently everyone is buying more synthesis tools. Something doesn’t compute here." A’stomping and a'hooting ensued. The cockfight was ended because the cops had been called in to put a stop to the thing. Officer Gary said: "The seat count's going up even though the number of design starts is going down. That's because we sell to sectors, not to designs. Also – the price wars have been horrible!" Rajeev and John duked it out for a couple minutes over whether Magma was bigger than Cadence and Synopsys combined in the digital P&R with synthesis market. Of course, Ted and Antun didn't want to walk away, so they jumped with 4 fists swinging as well. And in a heartbeat, they were all yelling – Rajeev, John, Antun, Ted – nobody could be heard. The audience was hooting. Somebody thought about calling hotel security. The videographers looked nervous. But the thing was settled when … Ted said: "We've had 100 90-nanometer tapeouts!" Rajeev said: "Well, we've got 60 percent of that market!" Antun said: "Well, we've got 50 percent of that market!" John said: "Well, add 60 to 50, and that means Cadence has minus 10 percent of the market. Is that right, Ted?" Bedlam. Ted went philosophical: "What does it mean to say that you're part of the flow?" John appealed to Gary. Officer Gary said: "It's the number of tapeouts versus dollars spent. Rajeev's done a good job of holding discipline – of selling tools for what they're worth. Many others are giving away quite a few tools fore free. Who’s got what share of the market? It's a 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 to each vendor." John turned to Pravin: "Do you guys actually have tapeouts?" Pravin said: "We're bringing a solution to market that integrates into any scenario and gives an overnight productivity boost, as design starts move to 5 to 10 million gates. We can lay claim to some tapeouts because we provide that functionality." John was nonplussed: "So Pravin? Who do you want to get acquired by?" John's mob went loud and unruly. More blood followed – Ted versus Rajeev versus Antun. Blathering about OpenAccess. Who was interoperable with who. Who truly cared. Who didn't. Accusation followed insult followed nonsense. Now things were pushing up against the 5 PM finish time. John addressed rumors about DAC. He turned to Ted: "Ted, tell us more about Cadence’s situation at DAC." Ted responded with confidence: "We’re starting to see a transformation. The focus is more on the technology than on trying to sell things. In the past, DAC was about telling our friends and neighbors what each of us is doing. But, last year we brought in the technology and we had chalk talks with real customers about what we’re doing. People thought that was really cool. We believe it was much more effective. But – the booth won't change." People in the audience whispered. Wasn't the word already out on the street? Cadence's booth had shrunk from a 100x100 in 2004 to a 40x40 in 2005. Had Ted not heard? John was quick: "So are you guys reducing your presence at DAC or not?" Ted was also quick: "I suspect the number of people there will be less." Good Citizen Robert jumped in on behalf of Mentor: "EDA is a very global industry. So, DAC is a good clearinghouse for our customers to meet each other. DAC is very, very important to us – the technical papers, the sessions. And DAC can't exist without investment from the industry. Also – DAC is a place where we're always happy to be getting resume from people at Cadence." Stomping. Whistling. Guys hanging off the rafters banged on the ceiling in ecstasy. Good Citizen Antun threw in a Synopsys benediction: "We're seeing changes at DAC, but there’s a big amount of money to be made at DAC. Yes, the conference is changing, but we believe it’s improving." John drilled down into the topic: "Jacob? Will you be increasing your presence at DAC? Will you have 3 people this year at DAC, or will you be upping that to 4?" Jacob spoke up on behalf of Forte: "This year we'll have much more opportunity to talk about production. So, we're definitely stepping up our DAC presence." The stomping and rafter banging continued. So, John let Pravin have a turn: "Pravin? How many Indians are you bringing?" Good Citizen Pravin was ready on behalf of Sierra Design: "We're a small company, but we take every opportunity we get to talk about our technology. Our booth at DAC is going up in size by 25 percent." John turned to Rajeev: "Rajeev?" Good Citizen Rajeev said for Magma: "We're still at the stage where DAC has value for us. You get to see people and participate in round tables – and it's a great networking opportunity!" So Gabe gave it one last shot: "Ted, how can you talk with customers and potential customers if you don't have demo suites on the floor at DAC?"
Ted looked everybody in the eye and said, "Our floor space will be the same." And then – perhaps on cue – Gabe asked: "Ted? Are you still going to invite John and me to your party?" Cooley didn’t wait for Ted to answer. He proudly announced: "I never get invited to the Cadence party!" The John Cooley Fan Club went wild. Something had to be done, and although John knew he could have had more, it was past 5 PM and he had to reign them in. Cooley said, "Thanks for coming, everybody. It's time for a beer." **************************************
Peggy Aycinena owns and operates EDA Confidential. She can be reached at peggy@aycinena.com
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