Moderator: Peggy Aycinena - Editor, EDA Confidential

Panelists (selected by Peggy):

• Ajoy Bose Chairman President & CEO, Atrenta, Inc.
• Diana Feng Raggett CEO, President & Co-Founder of Javelin Design Automation, Inc.
• Gary Meyers VP & GM of Synplicity Business Group, Synopsys, Inc.
• Lauro Rizzatti GM, EVE-USA
• Ravi Subramanian CEO, Berkeley Design Automation, Inc.
• Scott Sandler President, SpringSoft, Inc.
• Tom Sandoval CEO, Calypto Design Systems

• Ajoy: EDA is a driver for the semiconductor industry, so not dead unless semiconductor is dead.
• Diana: not business as usual, but not dead. Customers focus on "what is needed to ship" product.
• Gary: There are more electronics in our future, hence EDA can not be dead.
• Lauro: EDA is not in good health, with 500+ EDA companies, no exit strategies, and no room for growth.
• Ravi: Current situation is like a 100-year storm, and we can expect dramatic change. "There is no life without death", and can expect the same in EDA.
• Scott: EDA dies when electronics dies. Money will be made, but question is by whom?
• Tom: Different perspective now, where in the past he was in semiconductor and would beat up vendors for lowest price.

• Ajoy: Time constant of change in other parts of the design chain are slow, whereas the chip component changes very rapidly.
  
• Diana: is holistic integration an advantage?
  
• Gary: Question is what market gives the best ROI? Systems markets are too vertical, specialized.
  
• Lauro: Rejects the idea. Most important is that the two worlds of software and hardware should work together. (Echoing Aart's keynote address)
  
• Ravi: No need for expansion beyond tighter hardware-software integration.
  
• Scott: Increasing trend toward specialization means that EDA should stick to electronic design.
  
• Tom: Calypto products address system level link to RTL.
  

• Tom: Ability to automate system level to RTL, with more focus on power issues across an SoC.
• Scott: There are no cash cows in EDA. (Not sure if there was a roadmap mentioned, sorry if I missed something in my notes here).
  
• Ravi: Focus is on AMS, "analog is the new digital" meaning that analog is what fails now, and costs time to market. Markets BDA addresses are wireless, computer, and consumer. Requirements are accuracy, performance, capacity, and physical effects (i.e. parasitics).
• Lauro: debugging enhancements, scalable emulation.
• Gary: Synopsys addressed their "technology gap" with introduction of Custom Designer. Forthcoming are more integrated solutions, look for a brand new top down design system to be announced at SNUG.
• Diana: "Path finding". Talked about recent announcement with Qualcomm and IMEC on solutions for stacking memory on logic. Results in lower power and higher bandwidth.
• Ajoy: Must find ways to better align with the roadmap of the semiconductor companies. "Where is semiconductor going"?
  

• Diana: Customers are being more pragmatic, tight budgets, everyone is looking for disruptive opportunities.
• Gary: Environment changed rapidly. Customers are focused on risk mitigation, closer partnering, reducing the number of flows.
• Lauro: difference is technical - increased complexity.
• Ravi: Survival is the utmost concern now. Customers have limited visibility, cost is the #1 risk. There has been a dramatic change in the level of collaboration, for example - RFCMOS. Nine of ten papers in the RF/Tuner session at ISSCC were customers of BDA. BDA recently announced AFS nano, allowing customers to shift more dollars to tough problems.
  
• Scott: One thing never changes in EDA; customers buy value.
• Tom: Customers want to know how can EDA help today?

• Diana: Discussed recent visit to Taiwan. Customers in Hsinchu industrial park are down to 1-day work week, fabless design houses in China closing, or merging. Companies looking to survive through collaboration, opening up to universities and research institutes.
• Scott: feels that Peggy's opening statement that EDA tools are underpriced is "ridiculous". The problem is commodity prices of products that are not differentiated.
• My take... YES!

• There were some other discussions that I did not bother taking notes on, such as Peggy's question about how much the EDA vendors support interns and universities.
  

• My take - overall:
  

• It was interesting, after all the discussion on non-differentiated products, and "rebirth" after death, that only Lauro raised his hand when Peggy asked if there are too many EDA companies.
• No one on the panel admitted to having laid off anyone since November 2008. (Interesting, as I was laid off as part of an end-of-year cutback at Synopsys, and we know there were other EDA companies that had layoffs as well.)
  
• I had not gone to any of the past "Troublemakers" panels at DVCon, but Peggy acknowledged replacing John Cooley (who had moderated those discussions in the past). Perhaps that is why Peggy was so confrontational to the panelists?
  
• Personally, I think it is different when a customer (or customer proxy) takes that approach. Anybody who has been in EDA is used to that. Customers pay a lot of money for EDA tools, and if there are bugs, or tools are delivered late, or they are over-hyped.. they have a valid gripe.
• But what does a journalist have to be so pissed off about?

The theme of this year’s ISSCC was “Adaptive Circuits and Systems”. Though semiconductor manufacturing technology may be close to reaching the physical limits of Moore’s Law, ISSCC-2009 showed that we are clearly not there yet. Progress continues to be made in shrinking transistors, with Intel disclosing the first use of 32nm technology, while also providing a vision for achieving the next step down to 22nm.

Presenters at ISSCC-2009 demonstrated how advances in technology and circuit innovation can be combined to make more adaptable devices, using digital control and programmability to provide benefits for many applications. This report highlights the most significant innovations from ISSCC in the areas of consumer electronics and digital media.

I needed to focus on linking my online presences to each other -- that is, my Twitter page would link to my LinkedIn page, which would link to my biography on my book-publisher's site. These interlinkages are key to understanding Google's page-ranking system.

For most non-journalists who do not maintain their own blog or Web site, it's a bit harder to create such a steady stream of new content on topics they want to associate with themselves. But it's not impossible. Ms. Drysdale recommends submitting articles to Web sites such as Squidoo.com, eHow.com or Google Knol on topics on that show off your expertise. "It's a huge branding opportunity," she says.