Functional testing is ugly, mind-numbing, labor-intensive work. At OVI'98, Jack Harding (then the CEO of Cadence) said in his keynote: "Our customers tell us 25 to 75 percent of their time is spent in verification." Another design engineer later e-mailed me: "Glen Dearth of Sun Microsystems said in his OVI paper that they have a 4:1 ratio of verifiers to designers. I heard another speaker claim a 2:1 ratio. A friend at Compaq said they were probably 1:1 but growing." Four months after that, Al Sibert of Nortel said at DAC'98: "Staffing is 2:1 of verification engineers to designers."

So Synopsys buying Vera was ob-viously a no-brainer. Of course they should buy it! It's a slam dunk! "Brilliant!" Think of the market and the revenue it could bring in! And that's their problem.

Vera's biggest rival, a language called "e" from an in-your-face Israeli startup named "Verisity," is eating Synopsys' lunch in that market. According to Dataquest, in 1997, Verisity had 84 percent and Vera had 16 percent of that $7.5 million market. In 1998, after the worldwide Synopsys marketing army had ownership of Vera, Vera grew to 19 percent of that now-$13.5 million market. It's been 18 months now. We won't have the 1999 Dataquest numbers for another nine months, but as the ESNUG moderator I know I should have been seeing all sorts of customer e-mails about Vera by now.

Remember, we're talking 2 to 4 verification engineers for every chip designer. And I know there are quite a few verification engineers on ESNUG (you get a lot of different types when you have 10,000 subscribers) yet there's no discussion of Vera whatsoever? What's up here? Yup, it's probably some world-class Synopsys marketing incompetence at work here.

When Ghulam Nurie, the marketing VP at System Science when it was acquired, said, "We have a very good technology, but we needed further help in the marketing area," he wasn't kidding. Mark Stevens of Sequoia Capital, a VC firm that invests in EDA startups, once said, "Marketing and marketing clout will beat technology every time." Obviously Mark had not yet met the Synopsys clowns in charge of promoting Vera. Too bad. He might have changed his quote to: "Except for Synopsys Vera, marketing and . . ."

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