Editor's Notebook: DesignCon 2005 One point of view out of many ...
The International Engineering Consortium's DesignCon 2005 took place this week at the Santa Clara Convention Center. By the looks of things, it was a big success – lots and lots of engineers were there, and they had lots of talks, panels, sessions and conversation available to them as conduits for learning. What follows is an attempt to convey what I saw/learned this week at DesignCon. What other people saw/learned would be unique to their experience at the conference, and the care and/or luck with which they decided which session, panel, exhibit or conversation to turn their attention to each hour they were there. * The Monday/Cadence Keynote At High Noon on Monday, Dataquest's Gary Smith, EDN's Gabe Moretti, EDN's Mike Santarini, Verisity's Lori Kate Smith, CMP's Ron Wilson, and I all stood just outside the doors of the Golden Gate Ballroom waiting to be allowed in for the Monday Keynote Address. Our speaker was to be the CEO of Cadence, Mike Fister. Just before the doors opened, Gary said something like "We're all looking forward to hearing what Michael has to say." Well, we're going to have to wait a little longer as it turns out. When the doors opened, the first thing Mike Santarini said was, "Look, there's Ted Vucurevich. I'll bet he's going to be giving the keynote instead of Mike." I was pretty surprised. I admire Ted Vucurevich, the CTO at Cadence – his energy, his style, and his creativity – but I came to hear the CEO of Cadence. As we went into the ballroom, some people went up to greet Ted. I went up and found David Cohen, Senior Manager for Executive Communications at Cadence. I asked him if Ted was indeed going to be giving the address, and David confirmed that this was the case. He explained that Mike Fister had been called away at the very last minute, to fly to Israel just the day before in order to attend meetings with the Israeli government regarding the pending Cadence acquisition of Verisity – Verisitiy being an Israeli company. That seemed both hectic for Mr. Fister and disappointing for the rest of us. So anyway, we all took our seats – there were about 200 in the ballroom – and ate our turkey sandwiches. Then Ted stood up to speak. He was very enthusiastic and had lots of show-and-tell items to illustrate his talk. Ted held up a personal glucose meter for diabetics, a satellite radio, an iPoD, an Xbox, a digital camera, and a copy of Elle Magazine. He talked about trendy feature-rich, color-coordinated cell phones, his wife's ability to color coordinate, his inability to color coordinate, how wonderful design engineers are, how grateful Cadence is to those design engineers – many of whom he was addressing in person as they constituted the bulk of the lunchtime crowd – and how engineers and the companies that employ them need to think outside the box these days by working to embrace disparate disciplines and disparate corporate entities if they want to meet the insatiable demands of the growing consumer markets worldwide. Ted said everybody needs to take a page from Apple's book. Ted said that just like Steve Jobs and Apple worked to get their iPoD designed, produced and marketed with the requisite form factor (small), storage capacity (huge), and search capabilities (random) needed to shuffle the downloadable music that Apple itself is involved in making available to everybody on-line – others now need to do the same. Ted said the iPod is a shining example of a product that required coordination across various business unites within Apple and, even more importantly, required coordination across 30+ corporations outside of Apple, so that hardware designers, software designers, on-line service provides, musicians, vendors of music IP, and the industrial/product designers who read and sell ads in magazines like Elle could all work together to bring a product to fruition. Ted said that this is the wave of the future and that all corporations – his included – should sit up and take notice and learn to work together, so that we can all move together in a (color) coordinated manner into the consumer-electronics-rich world that our children are demanding that we provide for them. Ted said this is all going to be very exciting. It was fun to hear him tell us about it. Ted said Cadence provides tools for the artist and that the design engineers are those artists. Everybody in his audience seemed to agree and when he was done, most seemed to go away well fed and happy. I suspect that most of the engineers in the ballroom on Monday were there for the complimentary lunch, and they went away satisfied. Some subset of the audience was there to eat and hear the Monday keynote, and they also went away satisfied. Some subset of that subset came to eat, to hear the Monday keynote, and to hear the Cadence keynote, and they went away satisfied as well. However, for the subset of the subset of the subset that came to eat, to hear the keynote, to hear the Cadence keynote, and to hear the Cadence CEO himself give the keynote – they did not go away satisfied. They a) wished that they had known in advance because they might not have come, and b) wondered if giving a major keynote address that had been booked way in advance wasn't something that the Israeli government would have understood and would have permitted to go ahead as planned by changing their meeting date, or allowing at least one of the meeting participants to attend via a conference call. But, at this point – who knows and who cares. I don't. Do you? * The IEC DesignCon DesignVision Awards If you've ever had any doubts that engineers – or the companies that they work for – are human, you should have been in the SRO crowd that was crammed into a small meeting room upstairs in the Santa Clara Convention Center at 11 AM on Tuesday, February 1st. You would have been amazed at how excited engineers – and the companies they work for – can get. This was the moment at which the awarding of the first annual IEC DesignCon DesignVision Awards were being announced and presented. There were a lot of people – maybe 75 – crowded into a room that would have been hard-pressed to handle 40, and it was really a lot of fun! The folks from IEC were at the helm for the hour – Roger Plumber, Cliff Ward and Barry Sullivan – and they did a great job … 19 envelopes were opened, , and 19 really good-looking plaques were presented to the various representatives of the 19 companies who came up one by one to receive their commendation. You know and I know that a lot of engineers are hard working stiffs buried in their labs or hunkered down over computers in their cubicles for the bulk of their professional lives. These guys rarely see the light of day, probably don't indulge in the latest and greatest gadgetry that the consumer-product mega machine produces because that's not the way real engineers live, probably don't have personal assistants, a phalanx of PR people handling their every utterance while in public, and don't fly first class when they travel around to meetings here at home or abroad. Engineers are people who are usually really, really smart, highly educated, pretty darn modest, and surprisingly well read, interesting, and articulate observers of the world. Engineers come up with great solutions to micro and macro problems, and then coordinate those solutions with the problems or markets that are articulated to them by the marketing and/or sales and/or AE's that are interfacing with the customers who will buy the solutions that the engineers are coming up with. All of those folks are trying to do all of this in something like a coordinated fashion while the senior executives in charge of the business and financial and legal matters of the company attend to those business/financial/legal matters so that the engineering/marketing/sales/customer support matters can go forward at a rapid pace to a compelling and profitable conclusion. The whole process, when you think about it, is downright amazing and I only mention all of this because in that over-crowded meeting room upstairs at the Santa Clara Convention Center on Tuesday at 11 AM, you would have seen a cool cross section of people receiving the awards that represented every class of person that I referenced in the previous paragraph. And none of them – neither engineers, nor sales/marketing/PR folks, nor senior executives including CEOs seemed jaded or unappreciative of the opportunity to participate in the contest, to be named as finalist in the contest, or to leap up and go to the front to receive the plaque that said they were a winner in the contest. It was very human and very fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah – there's a lot of blood-letting competition between the companies vying for these awards, and the awards are just going to gather dust in somebody's glass case and be forgotten way after the press release is issued to crow about it – but, it was a real and sincerely human hour on Tuesday morning nonetheless. In his introductory remarks, Roger Plumber, Executive Director of the IEC made a few historical references to the history of his organization. In listening to him, it wasn't hard to think back a hundred years and envision the progression in electrical and mechanical engineering from 1905, to 1915, 1925, 1935, 1945 – when the IEC was founded – 1955, 1965, 1975, 1985, 1995, and onto today in 2005. We can get so caught up in our color-coordinated, feature-rich, small-form-factor camera phones that, not only do we forget that the people behind all of the current products are real people, thoroughly delighted by being picked out in a crowd for commendation, we also forget that there's been a helluva lot of innovation and creative breakthroughs needed to get us to where we are today. In my mind, I'm hoping that all of us are able to impress upon our children that the ability to come up with original thoughts within an engineering context and then bring it to market to improve on the quality of life, is one of the highest accomplishments of the human intellect. Hopefully, our kids will be able to grasp the elegance of that process and hold it in higher, more profound esteem than the esteem with which they hold their trendy, color-coordinated, feature-rich, small-form-factor camera phones. I'm sorry if you missed the awards ceremony. Engineers and the people who manage the structure around those engineers are really neat people. And a world that has engineers at its core, is a good world. * The Tuesday/Synopsys Keynote Synopsys CEO Aart de Geus bounded onto the DesignCon Convention Center stage at noon on February 1st, and his energy level and enthusiasm never waned from the start to the finish of his carefully constructed, well thought through, nicely illustrated keynote address. Aart really knows how to give a keynote, and this one was great. (I know that Synopsys is frequently criticized in a plethora of areas, but in the spirit of DesignCon, can we just let that go for a minute? I will if you will, okay? Aart de Geus gave a damn fine keynote on Tuesday. End of story.) For those of you who don't know, being invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland is pretty much a crowning endorsement of a career well lived. Aart de Geus was in Davos last week and the fact that he was there is a serious reflection of the respect with which he is held in the world of the business, intellectual elite. Aart's talk started and ended with what he had thought about in Davos. Aart said that in listening to people discussing economics and technology at the same tine, he decided to coin a phrase, which could embrace them both – techonomics. Aart said the secret to unraveling the problems in techonomics is to approach it from a systemic point of view. Look at the larger system within which the smaller subsets of problems are expressing themselves. And with that, Aart was off and running. He asked his audience – a room full of 500+ engineers, scientists, and managers – to come with him from the macro level – looking at a global economy that's impacted by transient technologies and ancient human needs like poverty, health education, and corruption, to the micro level – looking at 45-nanometer device geometries and below, devices characterized by low-k dielectrics, copper interconnects, insidious power-leakage issues, and time-to-market pressures that cause those devices to go out the door before they're fully proven and verified. Aart talked about lithography, yield, random defects, dummy fills, timing closure, dynamic power, design for manufacturing, and the fact that companies and engineers need to manage the looming problems of smaller geometries and bigger systems. Aart talked about his sense that these things aren't going to be resolved in an elegant way unless they're approached with a strategy that addresses the higher levels of abstraction – a systemic strategy that he said was similar to the strategy needed to find an integrated solution to those ancient human dilemmas he mentioned at the outset. Aart touched on lofty themes and gritty engineering realities, knitting them together seamlessly in the best tradition of EDA tools and those who try to make them work to a common end. Aart's talk ended, interestingly enough, with somewhat the same conclusion that Ted Vucurevich's talk had converged upon. We've all got to pull together. We've got to do all of this from a systems point of view. The tools have got to work together, the engineering teams needs to work together, companies within the micro and macro product-development and manufacturing eco-system need to work together, and the social, economic, legal, and governmental entities that define societies across the globe need to work together to a common purpose with an optimized and coordinated game plan for reaching agreed-upon goals. Aart did a great job of articulating the vision. He said that if his audience worked together to realize the promise of technological advancement, in so doing they would assist the larger human goals of advancing education, health, and well being around the world. Whether anyone who was in the audience is willing and/or able to do all this remains to be seen. * The Wednesday/Mentor Graphics Keynote Mentor Graphics CEO Wally Rhines is so comfortable these days speaking in a theater in front of a large engineering audience – in recent years, he faced so many audiences like the one at noon on Wednesday, the 2nd, at DesignCon – that he didn't even have to stand behind the podium to deliver his remarks. In the great tradition of high-tech conferences everywhere, Wally stood and moved comfortably about at center stage of the theater in the Santa Clara Convention Center to deliver his keynote address. Wally's topic was the ITRS Road Map, and what we do or don't want to do to obey its inferences. He said that 80 percent of the design starts in 2004 were still at 180 nanometers, which of course flies in the face of marketing & sales hype everywhere that wants to convince you that everything's up and running at 90 nanometers, and maybe even 65. Wally said that some people today are even still designing to 1 micron, although he wondered where they' were finding a fab who could manufacture anything at that node anymore. Wally had numerous, ominous, design-trend graphics to illustrate his suggestion that at the rate and success that we're not having moving from 180 nanometers to 130, 90, and below – it may develop that we're only laying down the ground work for the 22-nanometer node, but it will be left to our children's generation to actually implement it, or anything close to it. So Wally's question was what to do and how to move forward, how to get better products if the smaller geometries are not our friends. Wally said that when these circumstances develop, and we've seen it before, a whole host of solutions start to appear on the market. In the case of the difficulties he was enumerating, he said things like structured ASICs, platform ASICs, reconfigurable architectures, cell-based platforms, etc. are all competing for attention and legitimacy as solutions to the problems and costs of developing products today. He said that "when there's this much activity, something's going on and something's going to happen" to sort it all out. Wally was talking directly to the engineers in the audience – something that he does just about better than anybody – and they were definitely listening. He was talking about the stuff they're dealing with day in and day out, which solutions they're thinking about pursuing, which directions they might want to go, and how to figure out how to spend valuable R&D resources. Wally said in times of confusing technology diversity, sometimes it takes until the next generation of contributors is ushered in, before the thing sorts itself out and people can finally see the right direction to go. Wally's most compelling visual – the one he said many people are very familiar with – was a slide of Makimoto's wave (for Dr. Tsugio Makimoto of Sony, who developed the concept.). It showed a graphical representation of how technological advances swing in sin-wave-like fashion between standardization and customization. He said that right now, we're kind of at the customization part of the cycle, what with all of the options being pursued, but what will dominate the technology when the cycle swings to standardization is not yet clear. Which is why Wally always has his audience right there with him when he's speaking. His audience knows an engineer when they see one – it's somebody who's willing to consider all of the options on the table in front of him, and who tries to sort out which one of the options is optimal given the environment within which the solution needs to function. Wally's audience is thinking about this kind of stuff and, if Wally's keynote is any indication, so is Wally. * A final note for now A number of people this week told me that DesignCon is really a great show, and this week was no exception. A number of people told me it's a place where you can really get a handle on things going on in design and engineering, and apparently this week was no exception. If the people at IEC are listening, the praise can't get much higher than that. **************************** Next week – Talking about Verification at DesignCon ****************************
Peggy Aycinena owns and operates EDA Confidential. She can be reached at peggy@aycinena.com
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