One friend had been at TI for more than 10 years. One day he's pulling in big bucks, the next he's struggling to feed three kids and pay the mortgage.

An engineer at Mindspeed in Colorado gets laid off. Then Compaq cuts begin to show up in my mail box. Nortel's shrinking big time. Some ex-Moto engineers join the party; so do some from Vitesse, Sun and EMC. My DAC survey brings this response: "I was forced to lay off my entire design staff in April. I have continued to work as an independent consultant and was unable to attend this year's DAC." A Silicon Valley friend reports that traffic is down by 30 percent because of all the layoffs. And, yesterday, I received one of those sudden change-of-address e-mails from an engineer who had worked at AMD the week before.

It's not just the EDA users who are being cut: EDA makers also feel the pain. One engineer at Cadence had to go back to India because he lost his H-1B visa after he lost his job. Another engineer I knew at Synopsys, one with two kids and a mortgage, was out of work for nine months before he finally found a job at Neolinear. It's everywhere.

That's why I cheered when I heard about Mentor's Displaced Worker Program. Training classes in Mentor tools are now free for unemployed engineers.

"I was reviewing our training business and saw we had the seats. Companies weren't sending employees; instead they were laying off. So I thought, 'There's no downside here. Let's do what can we do to help these unemployed engineers.' It seems to have struck a chord with a lot of people," Greg Hinckley, president of Mentor Graphics,said in a phone interview.

Hinckley himself was fired "back in the recession of 1991," he said. "It took me 12 months to find my next job after that. I know what it's like when you're at the point where you're looking at running out of savings.

"We've had 270 applicants. We've already accepted 116 into classes. "There's nothing but upside here," he said. "But it's also the right thing to do."

In my book, he couldn't be more right.

See www.mentor.com/es/dwp/.

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.