EDA Duopoly: One too many?

Ever since Sramana Mitra analyzed the Mendance deal as a necessity for consolidation as well to spur innovation, I have been keen in studying how this might play out. Not in the hypothetical, over-a-Heineken manner, but in a more Nash-equilibrium kind of a way. A very interesting financial engineering paper is Product innovation and imitation [...]

Cadence and Mentor sitting in a tree….

I think I’m the last to pick up on this Personally I like Wally Rhines presentations about EDA  and the anarchist in me is rooting for the small guy. But I think everyone is  overlooking Mentor’s system-level design flows. Having a history in a System Level EDA company, it does seem to me that Catapult [...]

Kansas just went bye-bye

Its been more than a week, and I got the heart to post this now. I have moved away from Calypto… and EDA (in my daily work routine atleast). I have moved to a new hush-hush company working with grid computing and distributed systems. And what’s more…. I am working on the Windows platform. Mind [...]

EDA and tyres

One of these days, as I was reading on the Ford-Firestone feud, I got to thinking on how the tyre industry is similar (and different) from the EDA industry. As this page of JSTOR(as part of the Journal of Marketing) illustrates,  :  The history of the tire industry has been of exit, rather than entry – so has been the case with the EDA industry, though unlike [...]

0.000000006 feet under – few inches deeper

My last post had a few comments which basically refutes my contention that open formats open up new sales channels. More importantly they push for putting a spin on sales strategies of companies. Here’s something interesting – this is a presentation of Wally Rhines, Mentor at DATE ’06. If we go over the presentation, we see [...]

0.000000006 feet under

What does the firing of Gary Smith  bode for the EDA industry? Not too good it would seem. I had commented on the EDA industry in my earlier posts. What looked positively heartening to me was that venture funding in the EDA industry looked to be going up. Although it can be argued, that the move [...]

And God said…let there be

And there was a new EDA tool. Rife with all the pleasures of architecting it and the pains of seeing it dissected by infidels!! But verily I say unto thee, I will show you the path of     O(log n) complexity upon which you will walk with <10% inaccuracy!! A large part of EDA tool designing [...]

Saturday Night Blues(pec)

There was an interesting article by one of the guys of BlueSpec, about how the threading model is deficient.  It is a topic often touched upon by George Harper in several of his articles (and my comments! ) 'Tis but a simple enough approach – Let thy not believe in thy own scheduling. Ask for [...]

Chip clocking breakthrough promised

A chip design startu, Multigig Inc. has promised a new design methodology that could result in power reduction of 75%. Now, I strongly suspect this is dynamic power as opposed to leakage power (which would require changes in manufacturing processes). If this works, this would be very cool (pun intended). For a long time now, [...]

Venture Capital funding in semiconductors going up…

I was reading through the 2006 Venture Capital Industry Report and found a very interestin, and very heartening, news. (Pg. 10) The number of companies and amount of capital invested in semiconductors and electronics has grown significantly, reflecting increasing activity in storage, mobile, and consumer devices. The median amount invested in semiconductors is standing at [...]