Like most EDA users then, I had no idea who Ray Bingham was. When I read his bio, I realized Cadence must have been in serious trouble. Ray's degree was in economics. He had 10 years' experience doing financials for Marriott and Red Roof Inn. And he was the Cadence CFO for six years before being picked as CEO. It was as if the Cadence board had a Forrest Gump contest and Ray had won. Having a bean counter with absolutely no engineering experience head the world's largest EDA company appeared to be sheer stupidity. D'oh!

I wasn't alone. Former Cadence CEO Joe Costello and former Cadence marketing VP Tony Zingale agreed in an EE Times article four months after Ray had become CEO. "If you look across their management team, there's no EDA technologist," said Tony Zingale. "Where is the next-generation vision for Cadence going to emanate from?" Cadence stock dropped another 25 percent, to $9.

That was a little over two years ago. When I stepped into the Cadence demo suite at DAC last month, I realized how wrong I was about Ray. He may not know technology, but his advisers do. And what I saw told me that Ray had organizational skills I hadn't appreciated before. Ping Chao, Wei-Jin Dai, Chin-Chi Teng and Kit Lam Cheong from Silicon Perspectives were there. From CadMOS, there were Ken Tseng, Vinod Kariat and Nishath Verghese. From Plato there were Limin He, David Yao, Louis Chao, and Wenyong Deng. And from what I heard about Simplex, Steve Teig, Tom Kronmiller, Narain Arora and David Overhauser were coming over to Cadence, too.

This shocked me. Instead of Cadence milking a startup's success while slowly killing its R&D, Ray's Cadence had put the R&D people acquired from the startups into positions of power. They were replacing the old guard that had failed in that EDA niche. Whoa! Ray's Cadence had gotten over the Not Invented Here syndrome. Integration Ensemble's broke? Use Silicon Perspectives instead. Hyperextract's choking? Try Simplex. Warp Route's dying? Say hello to Plato! Assura-SI gives you flakey results? Replace it with CadMOS. The Cadence Ray has made has no sacred cows. Double whoa.

John Cooley runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG), is a Contract ASIC Designer and loves hearing from engineers at jcooley@theworld.com or (508) 429-4357.