July 27

Cadence on the fence about DAC 2007?

Multiple sources told EE Times that Cadence Design Systems Inc. did not select a booth space for the 44th Design Automation Conference during a meeting here Wednesday (July 26), fueling speculation that the No. 1 EDA vendor is considering not exhibiting at the show, scheduled for next June in San Diego.

Cadence scaled down its presence at DAC last year, and then even further this year. This was reportedly a sore spot among DAC organizers.

Steven T. Levitan, chair of the 44th DAC, confirmed that Cadence has not yet selected space, but downplayed it, saying it's normal for companies to select space throughout the year.

Levitan did say that 175 companies did participate in the booth selection process and floor space for the exhibit is 90 percent committed. There were 252 exhibitors at this year's DAC.

Cadence's failure select booth space for a show still 10 months away may mean nothing. DAC was taking in exhibitors as late as last week for this year's event, and it's a good bet that Cadence could wander in and secure booth space at the last minute if it so chooses.

But, on the other hand, the company's failure to select space has fueled speculation that Cadence is considering walking away from DAC altogether. The move would not be without precedence. In recent years, companies, especially those with enviable market positions, have increasingly questioned the value of trade shows, which carry a considerable price tag.

In recent years, a handful of top-tier semiconductor equipment companies like Novellus Systems Inc. and Lam Research Corp. have stopped exhibiting at Semicon West, that industry's premier event. Many believe that Semicon Southwest, once another major event for equipment vendors, was killed when No. 1 semiconductor equipment vendor Applied Materials stopped exhibiting several years ago.

A spokesperson for Cadence Thursday said he had heard nothing about a decision to not exhibit at next year's DAC. The company attended the meeting, but opted not to make a selection, the spokesperson said.

On Monday (July 31), a Cadence spokesperson said the company had nothing further to say about the situation at this time.

Attendance strongest since '01

Preliminary registration figures show that at least 11,352 attended the 43rd DAC, the highest total for the show since 2001, according to organizers.

The increased attendance is another feather in the cap of EDA, which is suddenly seems to be to enjoying a renaissance of sorts, with a steady stream of good news, including strong quarterly earnings announced by Cadence Design Systems Inc. Wednesday. But don't forget, this is also the first time since 1998 that DAC has been held in San Francisco, just a stone's through from the heart the Silicon Valley, where the majority of EDA companies are based.

DAC's preliminary attendance figures, broken out by category are: 3,231 registered conference attendees, 3,421 registered exhibit attendees and 4,700 total exhibitors, visitors and guests.

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July 26

Cadence Power Forwards, but who's on board?

Cadence Design Systems' Power Forward Initiative says it's opening the doors to EDA vendor participation, and to bring the point home, Cadence hosted a Wednesday luncheon presentation at the Design Automation Conference and invited a number of EDA vendor representatives. It worked for power analysis provider Sequence Design. "I really applaud Cadence for taking the next step," said Vic Kulkarni, Sequence CEO. "We endorse it and look forward to joining Power Forward."

But is Power Forward, aimed at developing a common power format, really open? It depends on who you talk to.

When the initiative was launched in May, it consisted of Cadence and seven user companies — AMD, ARM, ATI, Fujitsu, Freescale, NEC, and TSMC. No other EDA vendors were involved, and Cadence representatives said they'd be able to join only after a six-month development effort. Standardization through a standards body wasn't expected until 2008. Earlier this month, Cadence relented and said that EDA vendors will be welcome to join the initiative's advisory group, which will oversee the initial development.

Kevin Kranen, director of strategic alliances at Synopsys Inc., attended the lunch but wasn't impressed. "The right thing is to get one solution for the industry, but it's got to be open, fast, and inclusive," he said. "If we have to wait for six months before we see anything, it doesn't fill that bill." Synopsys already offers many of the capabilities proposed for the initiative's Common Power Format (CPF), he said.

A source told EE Times that a group of EDA vendor and user companies, along with representatives of standards bodies, met privately at DAC in hopes of fostering a more "open, fast and inclusive" power standards effort. This meeting reportedly included STMicroelectronics, Philips, Texas Instruments, Nokia, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, Magma, and Cadence. It remains to be seen whether we'll end up with two competing efforts, or a meeting of the minds that will result in a single initiative.

SSTA adoption to be slow

Statistical static timing analysis methodology is the hot topic in EDA, but it will likely be "some time" before customers adopt it, according to Ed Wan, senior director of design service marketing at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC).

"Do we believe SSTA is real?" Wan asked. "We believe it enough to put it on our reference flow. That's not something we do lightly."

But, Wan said, SSTA is "something we need to push customers to adopt."

TSMC's reference flow 7.0, announced last week, includes SSTA support from several vendors.

Nvidia: Thumbs up on AMD-ATI

Some at DAC may have been too preoccupied to realize that Advanced Micro Devices Inc. confirmed Monday that it has an agreement to acquire graphics specialist ATI Technologies Inc. for about $5.4 billion

The event did not go unnoticed by Chris Malachowsky, co-founder and senior vice president of engineering and operations at Nvidia Corp., a chief ATI competitor. Speaking at the EDA Consortium event Tuesday (July 25), Malachowsky whole-heartedly applauded the move.

"From my perspective, it's the best thing that ever happened," Malachowsky said. "We are not the sole surviving GPU company."

Malachowsky added, "We offered them [ATI] a need to take a new strategic direction, so they found one."

Malachowsky said Nvidia will continue to support all processors.

Max does DAC—and paints

Programmable Logic DesignLine Editor Clive "Max" Maxfield has created a blog to d escribe his day-to-day DAC movements. We are impressed with his painting ability. Check out: http://www.pldesignline.com/blogs/index.jhtml#191100343

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July 25

Mighty Spirit

Maybe it was just the promise of free cocktails, but more than 175 people turned out for a Spirit Consortium meeting Monday evening.

Ralph von Vignau, president of the Spirit Consortium, told attendees that, after initially envisioning a two-year lifespan for the consortium when it came together in 2003, Spirit plans to stick around to provide further technical specifications for integration of multi-vendor design flows.

Vignau announced that the consortium has been incorporated in California as a non-profit mutual benefit corporation. He also unveiled Spirit's snappy new logo and said it has changed the name of its specification to IP-XACT.

Take the heavy attendance and apparently sudden explosion of interest in Spirit to mean that the pain of integrating multi-vendor flows continues to be felt.

City government in action

San Francisco is pulling out all of the stops to recognize the 43rd DAC. Mayor Gavin Newsom filmed a videotaped welcome to DAC message last week, and the city proclaimed Tuesday "DAC Day."

"On behalf of the city and county of San Francisco, I am proud to welcome the 43rd Design Automation Conference to San Francisco," Newsom said in a written proclamation. "In recognition of DAC's 40-year commitment to advancing technologies to enable electronics products of all kinds, I do hereby proclaim Tuesday, July 25, 2006 as Design Automation Conference Day in San Francisco."

Top that, San Diego.

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July 24

Attendance up?

Organizers of the 43rd Design Automation Conference said that, as of 2 p.m. Monday (July 24), more than 6,895 attendees had registered for DAC, up 20 percent from the number of registered attendees at the same time last year.

Expectations have been that the conference will draw more than 11,000 during the week.

Where new EDA leaders will come from

In his latest EDA Market Trends report, Gary Smith, chief EDA analyst at Gartner Dataquest, wrote that growth in the EDA industry will be stalled until "new leaders emerge." At a panel presentation at the Design Automation Conference, Smith had a few things to say about how that might happen.

If we are to see new leaders emerge, Smith said, it will most likely happen in electronic system level (ESL) design. He suggested that several companies might come together, in the way that ECAD, SDA Systems, Tangent, and Gateway combined to form Cadence Design Systems in the 1980's.

"If Magma could get this damn [Synopsys] lawsuit off their backs, they're going to go out and do an acquisition spree and do what Cadence did," Smith said.

A second possibility is that several design for manufacturing (DFM) providers could build a company. A third is that several analog/mixed-signal providers could merge. He suggested that observers "follow Jim Solomon and Jim Hogan around" and see what boards of directors these EDA veterans are on.

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July 23

IP theft paramount

Aart de Geus, Synopsys Inc. chairman and CEO and also chairman of the EDA Consortium, got the ball rolling Sunday evening (July 23) with a brief intro on the consortium's benefits. Opening the 18th annual Gartner Dataquest Executive Briefing on the eve of the Design Automation Conference, de Gues highlighted a number of issues facing EDA, including intellectual property protection.

"There are Web sites where software made by anyone in this room can be ordered, almost for free," de Gues said. "And by the way, it's very recent software."

Later, de Geus showed a chart depicted revenue by EDA and semiconductor intellectual property vendors over the past several years, jokingly adding that you have to look closely to see that revenue has been growing.

"The EDA industry can be viewed as lousy because it's flat, or it can be viewed as very stable compared to our customers."

In-house tool use on the rise
Gartner's chief EDA analyst, Gary Smith, had some sobering news for EDA vendors. While praising EDA for keeping the cost of IC design stable for the past 10 years, Smith also said that use of internally developed design tools by IDMs is on the rise.

Last year, Smith sounded alarm bells by reporting that the results of a Gartner Dataquest survey showed that 28 percent of chip designers were using at least some internally developed tools. This year, he said, a similar survey revealed that that number has grown to 38 percent.

Giving it away

Smith also had some harsh words for leading programmable logic suppliers Xilinx Inc. and Altera Corp. The companies' strategy to give away FPGA synthesis tools "drives me crazy," Smith said.

Smith, a former semiconductor industry executive, said one of his former companies was forced to stop making design tools for customers after investors raised a red flag over the money being spent on the project.

"I can't believe the investors aren't going to someday look at that [Xilinx and Altera's design tool development] and say, 'Why are you developing these design tools,' " Smith said.

But, he added "I've said that for the past 10 years, and they aren't listening."