I just met John Donovan, Editor with Low-Power Design. We’re on laptops blogging, tweeting and catching up on emails.
Rick Stanton, Director of Strategy at Dassault Systems chatted with me about using social media in EDA. We both prefer to use LinkedIn for business and turn off Facebook status updates. Even when using Facebook for personal networking we turn off all the application updates (Mafia Wars, Poker, etc.).
Peggy Aycinena blogs and believes that journalists should cover the news at DAC and not be the news, so no photo.
Lee Wood from MP Associates is behind the scenes making DAC come to life each year for vendors, press and attendees. Lee confirmed that pre-registration at DAC this year jumped 35% compared to last year, so I’m thinking that Free Monday is going to be crowded in the exhibit area.
Gabe Moretti blogs about EDA and has teamed with Gary Smith to keep the EDA wall charts updates.
Jean Armstrong from Armstrong and Associates handles PR for Lynguent, a provider of modelling tools for Analog and Mixed-signal developers, and Extreme-DA who offer static timing.
John Cooley a pioneer in EDA bloggin took my photo so I tried to return the favor but he was being coy. Look for my technical review of SPICE simulators in Cooley’s annual DAC trip report.
John Miklosz is the editor of SOC Central and we had a lively discussion about how to offer an EDA tools directory that was up to date and relevant.
Linda Marchant, VP at Cayenne is one busy person this week at DAC. Her PR company represents many EDA/IP companies: AtopTech, Apache, Azuro, Berkeley DA, Cliosoft, Concept Engineering, Gradient DA, Pyxis, Satin IP, Solido DA, Synfora, Tuscany DA and ViASIC.
Wally Rhines did his best to talk over the very noisy group at the DAC kick-off meeting tonight at the Intercontinental Hotel. For some reason the group socializes for one hour prior to the EDAC speech but then the group never quiets down enough to give the few speakers the respect they deserve to talk about our industry. Wally is the Mentor CEO – Presented the EDAC roadmap for DAC
– Mobile phone info is available at the show this year, product announcements may be posted by member companies
– Free Monday was brought back (loud applause), 1800 registered for that
– Phil Kaufman award – to be presented to Art De Geus on Tuesday
– Piracy Sessions this year (2) – let’s prevent theft of EDA software around the glob, Tuesday at 1PM and 11:30AM
– Roadside Assistance – you can become an EDAC member, become a committee member, networking, discounts at DAC, $500 discount on MSS
– Next year events: Nov Phil Kaufman award dinner, DAC in June at Anaheim
Gary Smith of Gary Smith EDA kind of surprised me by not wearing his usual white suit. He also had to speek over the crowd noise coming from the back of the room.
CAGR is 8.6% over the next 4 years, not explosive growth.
– ESL is taking off, more fpga seats, cae in double digit growth.
– Ic cad growth of 12-15%
– Could eda be a $12b market?
– ESL Seats – In the board/fpga segment there are about 5,00 seats
– Embedded systems has 40K (2007) to 60K seats (2011), however there’s too much free software, so let’s grow the asp of embedded seats to something like $30K.
– Sw part of esl is drifting away from eda
– Commercial embedded sw players are disappearing (wind river, keil, spectron, metroworks, qnx, microware, ati, tasking, sun)
– Mentor pays attention to embedded, others in EDA are still watching. Gary praised Mentor for having the foresite to buy into an RTOS company years ago.
– Why embedded? RTOS. Money is in multi-core tools. How to get a $30K tool for multi-core?
– Will semi vendors offer low-cost or no-cost embedded tools, akin to FPGA vendors offering free tools
– EDA of 12-15% predicted growth over the next decade
– Do you tweet? No way, see @lorikate. Here I think that Gary is plain missing the boat in terms of creating a dialog within the EDA industry.
As a blogger I received a special Media Badge which has a red, white and blue ribbon across the bottom. I feel a bit patriotic when I wear it. Tomorrow I’ll start blogging about EDA vendors that I visit with and share what I learn.
Great summary Daniel! A couple of suggestions on the links:
Dassault is at http://www.3ds.com/
John Cooley is at http://www.deepchip.com/
Linda Marchant is at http://www.cayennecom.com/
Peggy Aycinena also blogs at http://www10.edacafe.com/blogs/peggy-aycinena/
I missed the Sunday night event but the same issue with the amount of chatter from the back of the room obscuring the presentations was also true last year.
I am very interested in what you and John Miklosz are able to cook up for a better EDA Vendor directory.
[…] Daniel Payne Sunday at DAC – What really happens in the Press Room? […]
Thank you for the summary of the presentations Daniel.
At the back of the room I couldn’t hear a thing. While every year there’s chatter, the lack of formal seating this year contributed a lot.
While getting to $30K a seat for embedded tools presents a significant challenge (there is a different way), the one I don’t see mentioned is “channel”. ESL is already coming up against this issue as the potential buyer categories broaden. Moving all the way into embedded tools means selling and supporting a completely different set of customers that are even more geographically distributed than semi development teams.
Of course, there’s the shameless plug for Xuropa to help with this challenge, but beyond the statistics of EDA there needs to be a discussion of the business of EDA.
James,
For the Sunday night EDAC event next year we could simply use two rooms. This first is for networking and the second is for listening to the presentations.
I agree that the huge challenge at getting the SW people to buy ESL or EDA tools is the tool ASP. Most SW folks are used to paying $0 to $3K for an IDE, so the thought of shelling out $30K per seat is a huge stretch of the imagination and budget. The SaaS model may provide some economic relief in this.
All the best to Xuropa in trimming the costs of sales by broadening the sales channel using web2.0.
Hi Daniel,
My clients were very pleased with the booth traffic this year. It was not huge but it was quality according to them.
I was pleasantly surprised by the energy of DAC. I anticipated a much more subdued event, given the economy.
I am not happy with the EDAC event. It is a shame to have presentations being made and very few people paying any attention to them. Even when you wanted to listen it was almost impossible to hear them. Maybe your idea of two rooms would solve the problem, I don’t know.
Jean
Jean,
I’m glad to hear about happy EDA companies at DAC this year.
FYI – It’s OK to name your EDA clients on this blog, I know that http://www.lynguent.com/is one of them.
There has been ample feedback to EDAC that the Sunday night format has to change in order to stay relevant. Let’s see what they do at #47DAC.
Daniel