At first, I panicked. I had sent out my annual Design Automation Conference Survey to the 11,000-plus members on my ESNUG mailing list, and I had received back only 58 replies.

Fifty-eight? Last year I'd gotten 113 replies to that survey. What was going on? I was down 49 percent?

Since I had a massive DAC trip report to write up, I started sending personal e-mails to engineers I knew, asking why they hadn't replied to this year's survey. I must have sent out 30 such e-mails.

Then the answers started coming back.

"Sorry, I didn't go to DAC, so I can't comment on that poll," wrote Wilson Snyder of Maker Communications. "The simple answer is that I did not go, so I missed all the fun," said Paul Pontin of 3Dlabs. "I did not go to DAC this year. Belt-tightening. Maybe next year," said Tom Coonan of Scientific-Atlanta. "I was unable to attend, so I couldn't comment," wrote Dale Lomelino of Philips.

More responses came in. "I'm afraid I didn't attend DAC," said Bob Wiegand of NxtWave. "Didn't make it to DAC this year," wrote Jeff Buckles of NEC. "I'm afraid I didn't get to go this year," said Lars Bo Graversen of MIPS. "I didn't go to DAC this year, with all of the work I got sucked into," wrote Gregg Lahti of Corrent.

"I didn't go to DAC," echoed Paul Zimmer of Cisco. "I had too much work. I had to cancel my DAC trip," wrote Caesar Abedin of AMCC.

"Unfortunately this year I did not attend DAC, so I don't have a trip report," wrote Tim Wilson of Intel. "The thing is that I didn't go to DAC," said Menno Spijker of Mitel.

"I haven't been to DAC. Money and time are tight this summer," said Tony Laundrie of SGI. "I didn't attend DAC 2001, hence I can say little about it," said Raimund Soenning of Philips.

The litany continued. "I am very busy with our new project recently. No DAC," said Qi Chen of Gennum. "I didn't go to DAC this year. Too busy," wrote Jay McDougal of Agilent.

"I didn't attend DAC this year. Went on vacation instead," said Chris Kiegle of IBM. "Biggest reason is I did not go to DAC this year. Budget cuts," wrote Phil Hoppes of Intersil. "I did not do DAC this time around," said Oren Rubinstein of Nvidia.

The DAC people originally reported a 15 percent drop in attendance this year. But my data was saying it was much worse. When I called them on that, they gave me their registration stats for the last two years. Doing the math, I found that 4,165 people were EDA buyers at DAC last year. This year, only 2,501 EDA buyers came. That is, 1,664 EDA buyers didn't show up this time. That's a 40 percent drop.

No wonder I was having a hard time getting responses to my survey.

John Cooley runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG), is a contract ASIC designer and loves hearing from engineersat (jcooley@world.std.com) or (508) 429-4357.