harry … the ASIC guy

(Photo courtesy Ron Ploof) 

I had the pleasure yesterday of interviewing Brian Bailey in the Synopsys Conversation Central Stage at DAC. We discussed his roots in verification working with the initial developers of digital simulation tools and his blogging experiences these past few years. There are, of course, even a few comments on the difference between journalists and bloggers

You can listen to this half hour interview at the Synopsys Blog Talk Radio site. I’d be interested in your comments on the show and the format as well. It was pretty fun, especially in front of a live audience.

At 12:30 PDT today, I’ll be doing another interview on Security Standards for the Cloud. You can tune in live on your computer or mobile device by going to the main Synopsys Blog Talk Radio Page. So, even if you’re not here at DAC, you can still partake.

harry the ASIC guy

Last year’s Design Automation Conference was kind of quiet and dull, muted by the impact of the global recession with low attendance and just not a lot of real interesting new developments. This year looks very different; I’m actually having to make some tough choices of what sessions to attend. And with all the recent acquisitions by Cadence and Synopsys, the landscape is changing all around, which will make for some interesting discussion.

I’ll be at the conference Monday through Wednesday. As a rule, I try to keep half of my schedule open for meeting up with friends and colleagues and for the unexpected. So if you want to chat, hopefully we can find some time. Here are the public events that I have lined up:

Monday

10:30 - 11:00 My good friend Ron Ploof will interviewing Peggy Aycinena on the Synopsys Conversation Central stage, so I can’t miss that. They both ask tough questions so that one may get chippy. (Or you can participate remotely live here)

11:30 - 12:00 I’ll be on that same Synopsys Conversation Central stage interviewing Verification Consultant and Blogger Extraordinaire Brian Bailey. Audience questions are encouraged, so please come and participate. (Or you can participate remotely live here)

3:00 - 4:00 I’ll be at the Atrenta 3D Blogfest at their booth. It should be an interesting interactive discussion and a good chance to learn about one of the 3 directions EDA is moving in.

6:00 - Cadence is having a Beer for Bloggers event but I’m not sure where. For the record, beer does not necessarily mean I’ll write good things. (This event was canceled since there is the Denali party that night).

Tuesday

8:30 - 10:15 For the 2nd straight year, a large fab, Global Foundries (last year it was TSMC) will be presenting their ideas on how the semiconductor design ecosystem should change From Contract to Collaboration: Delivering a New Approach to Foundry

10:30 - 12:00 I’ll be at a panel discussion on EDA Challenges and Options: Investing for the Future. Wally Rhines is the lead panelist so it should be interesting as well.

12:30 - 1:00 I’ll be back at the Synopsys Conversation Central stage interviewing James Wendorf (IEEE) and Jeff Green (McAfee) about standards for cloud computing security, one of the hot topics.

Wednesday

10:30 - 11:30 I’ll be at the Starbucks outside the convention floor with Xuropa and Sigasi. We’ll be giving out Belgian Chocolate and invitations to use the Sigasi-Xilinx lab on Xuropa.

2:00 - 4:00 James Colgan, CEO of Xuropa, and representatives from Amazon, Synopsys, Cadence, Berkeley and Altera will be on a panel discussion on Does IC Design have a Future In the Cloud?. You know what I think!

This is my plan. Things might change. I hope I run into some of you there.

harry the ASIC guy

About a week ago, I got an email from someone I know doing a story on how the Design Automation Conference has changed with respect to bloggers since the first EDA Bloggers Birds-of-a-Feather Session 2 years ago. I gave a thoughtful response and some of it ended up in the story, but I thought it would be nice to share my original full response with you.

Has your perception of the differences between bloggers and press changed since the first BOF?

Forget my perception; many of the press are now bloggers! I don’t mean that in a mean way and I understand that people losing their jobs is never a good thing. But I think the lines have blurred because we all find ourselves in similar positions now. It’s not just in EDA … many, if not most, journalists also have a blog that they write on the side.

Ultimately, I think either the traditional “press” or a blog is just a channel between someone with knowledge to people who want information they can trust. What determines trust is the reliability of the source. In thepast, the trust was endowed by the reputation of the publication. Now, weall have to earn that trust.

As for traditional investigative journalism (ala All the President’s Men) and reporting the facts (5 Ws), I think there is still a role for that, butmost readers are looking for insight, not jut the facts.

What do you think of DAC’s latest attempts to address these differences, e.g. Blog-sphere on the show floor, press room in the usual location?

Frankly, I’m not sure exactly what DAC is doing along these lines this year. Last year bloggers had very similar access as journalists to the press room and other facilities. It was nice to be able to find a quiet place to sit, but since most bloggers are not under deadline to file stories it is not as critical. Wireless technology is making a lot of this obsolete since we can pretty much work from anywhere. Still, having the snacks is nice

What does the future hold for blogging at DAC?

Two years ago, blogging was the “new thing” at DAC. Last year, blogging was mainstream and Twitter was the new thing. This year blogging will probably be old skool and there will be another “new thing”. For instance, I think we’re all aware and even involved in Synopsys’ radio show. This stuff moves so fast. So, I think the future at DAC is not so much for blogging, as it is for multiple channels of all kinds, controlled not only by “the media”, but also the vendors, independents, etc. Someone attending DAC will be able to use his wireless device to tap into many channels, some in real-time.

Next year, I predict that personalized and location aware services will be a bigger deal. When you come near a booth, you may get an invitation for a free demo or latte if your profile indicates you are a prospective customer. You’ll be able to hold up your device and see a “google goggles” like view of the show floor. You may even be able to tell who among your contacts is at the show and where they are. Who knows? It will be interesting.

harry the ASIC guy

The other day, I was listening to John Wall interview Simon Sinek on the Marketing over Coffee Podcast. Simon Sinek is a marketing consultant and motivational speaker and has a book out entitled “Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action.” In addition to the podcast interview, I also came across the following presentation that Simon gave at a TedX conference a few months ago.

To make a long-story short, the key premise is that companies spend too much time marketing what they do and how they do it better than the other guy. This strategy may win you customers in the short-term, but only until the next guy comes along with a better offering.

Instead, Sinek contends that companies need to inspire customers by talking about why their company exists and how they intend to change the world. All people, and this includes customers, want to be inspired and to follow leaders with vision that matches theirs. Companies that can inspire effectively will gain loyal customers that will continue to buy even when a competitor offers a superior product at a lower cost.

Dell and HP and Gateway are busy telling us what they do, that they make computers that are higher speed, lower power, lower weight, better graphics, and lower in price than the competitor. And they can certainly sell computers in that manner … until a competitor beats them on one or more of these metrics. These companies are closing transactions, not gaining customers.

In contrast, Apple tells its story something like this: “we exist to challenge the status quo by making products that are elegant and easy to use”. To Apple’s customers, it doesn’t matter that PCs are less expensive or have longer battery life or support more software. Or that other smart phones can run multiple applications or have an open source OS or support a carrier with better 3G coverage. Or that other tablet computers have a camera or 3G or a phone built in. Apple’s customers are inspired by Apple’s story and will buy whatever Apple sells. Some call them blindly loyal, but who wouldn’t want to have customers like that.

There are lots of other examples. Nike inspires us to “just do it”. Harley Davidson inspires the Hell’s Angel in each of us. The Chicago Cubs prove that you can have an inferior product for a long time and still have the most loyal customers. (For the record, not a strategy I recommend). The Oakland Raiders, on the other hand, prove that loyalty doesn’t have to have a positive message, just one that inspires us.

And it’s not just about the customers. Employees can be inspired as well. An uninspired employee will leave if the pay is better or the commute is shorter or the work is more interesting elsewhere. An inspired employee will enthusiastically work longer hours for a lower salary just to be part of something special. And he won’t leave.

I admit that this idea is not really new. Seth Godin contends that people want to join Tribes and be led by leaders with vision. It’s really the same thing, put a little differently.

This seems to make sense in the business-to-consumer (B2C) market, but what about business-to-business (B2B). Can businesses really be inspired? Would they ever ignore their tradeoff charts, evaluation criteria, benchmarks, and ROI calculations and just go with their “gut feel”?

What about EDA? Clearly, this is an industry where marketing has been all about features and benefits. Has there ever been an EDA company that really inspired customers?

I may be a bit biased, but I think Synopsys was one of those companies when it first started out. As a Synopsys customer, I was inspired by the gospel of high-level design. So much so, that I got myself a job at Synopsys as an AE evangelizing the good news. (That’s really what we called it … evangelizing). To be part of a movement that changed the world (at least the EDA world) was exciting. It helped that we were small and close to the founders who had the original vision for the company. After all, we could carefully hire only those who shared our vision and would faithfully represent us to our customers.

But what about EDA today? Are there companies that inspire you, that you’d buy from even if their product is not the best? Does loyalty exist today anymore?

And if you run an EDA company, does your company inspire? Do you tell people why you exist, or just what you do? If it’s the latter, it might make sense to try the former.

Why not?

harry the ASIC guy

Although I was unable to attend DVCon last week, and I missed Jim Hogan and Paul McLellan presenting “So you want to start an EDA Company? Here’s how“, I was at least able to sit in on an interesting webinar offered by RTM Consulting entitled Achieving Breakthrough Customer Satisfaction through Project Excellence.

As you may recall, I wrote a previous blog post about a Consulting Soft Skills training curriculum developed by RTM in conjunction with Mentor Graphics for their consulting organization. Since that time, I’ve spoken on and off with RTM CEO Randy Mysliviec. During a recent conversation he made me aware of this webinar and offered one of the slots for me to attend. I figured it would be a good refresher, at a minimum, and if I came out of it with at least one new nugget or perspective, I was ahead of the game. So I accepted.

I decided to “live tweet” the seminar. That is to say, I posted tweets of anything interesting that I heard during the webinar, all using the hash tag #RTMConsulting. If you want to view the tweets from that webinar, go here.

After 15 years in the consulting biz, I certainly had learned a lot, and the webinar was indeed a good refresher on some of the basics of managing customer satisfaction. There was a lot of material for the 2 hours that we had, and there were no real breaks, so it was very dense and full of material. The only downside is that I wish there had been some more time for discussion or questions, but that’s really a minor nit to pick.

I did get a new insight out of the webinar, and so I guess I’m ahead of the game. I had never heard of the concept of the “burning platform” before, especially as applies to projects. The story goes that there was an oil rig in the North Sea that caught fire and was bound to be destroyed. One of the workers had to decide whether to stay on the rig or jump into the freezing waters. The fall might kill him and he’d face hypothermia within minutes if not rescued, but he decided to jump anyway, since probable death was better than certain death. According to the story, the man survived and was rescued. Happy ending.

The instructor observed that many projects are like burning platforms, destined for destruction unless radically rethought. In thinking back, I immediately thought of 2 projects I’d been involved with that turned out to be burning platforms.

The first was a situation where a design team was trying to reverse engineer an asynchronously designed processor in order to port it to another process. The motivation was that the processor (I think it was an ADSP 21 something or other) was being retired by the manufacturer and this company wanted to continue to use it nonetheless. We were called in when the project was already in trouble, significantly over budget and schedule and with no clear end in sight. After a few weeks of looking at the situation, we decided that there was no way they would ever be able to verify the timing and functionality of the ported design. We recommended that they kill this approach and start over with a standard processor core that could do the job. There was a lot of resistance, especially from the engineer whose idea it was to reverse engineer the existing processor. But, eventually the customer made the right choice and redesigned using an ARM core.

Another group at the same company also had a burning platform. They were on their 4th version of a particular chip and were still finding functional bugs. Each time they developed a test plan and executed it, there were still more bugs that they had missed. Clearly their verification methodology was outdated and insufficient, depending on directed tests and FPGA prototypes rather than more current measurable methods. We tried to convince them to use assertions, functional coverage, constrained random testing, etc. But they were convinced that they just had to fix the few known bugs and they’d be OK. From their perspective, it wasn’t worth all the time and effort to develop and execute a new plan. They never did take our recommendations and I lost track of that project. I wonder if they ever finished.

As I think about these 2 examples, I realize that “burning platform” projects have some characteristics in common. And they align with the 3 key elements of a project. To tell if you have a “burning platform” on your hands, you might ask yourself the following 3 questions:

1. Scope - Are you spending more and more time every week managing issues and risks? Is the list growing, rather than shrinking?
2. Schedule - Are you on a treadmill with regards to schedule? Do you update the schedule every month only to realize that the end date has moved out by a month, or more?
3. Resources - Are the people that you respect the most trying to jump off of the project? Are people afraid to join you?

If you answered yes to at least 2 of these, then you probably have a burning platform project on your hands. It’s time to jump in the water. That is, it’s time to scrap the plan and rethink your project from a fresh perspective and come up with a new plan. Of course, this is not a very scientific way of identifying an untenable project, but I think it’s a good rule-of-thumb.

There are other insights that I had from the webinar, but I thought I’d only share just the one. I don’t know if this particular webinar was recorded, but there are 2 more upcoming that you can attend. If you do, please feel free to live tweet the event like I did, using the #RTMConsulting hash tag.

But please, no “flaming”

harry the ASIC guy

As I’ve mentioned before, I live in California, the state with the 46th best elementary school system in the country. Thank you California Lottery! So keep that in mind as you read the rest of this post.

One of the more challenging homework assignments my 3rd grade daughter receives regularly is to write a short story using a list of the week’s dozen or so spelling words. For instance, this is one that she received not so long ago:

Write about a time when you worked very hard to learn something. Tell what the experience was like. Use spelling words from the list.

And the list was:

coach    blow    float    hold    sew    though

sold    soap    row    own    both    most

She wrote about the time she learned to play the piano at summer camp. I won’t embarrass her by posting the story here, but suffice it to say that it was pretty forced. Don’t even think about asking how she got the word “soap” into the story!

So, this evening, whilst walking the dog, I was listening to this week’s episode of Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech podcast (aka TWiT). On the podcast, someone mentioned a site called Wordstream. On this site, you can enter a keyword and it will tell you the most common search terms that includes that keyword. The idea is that, if you want to increase your SEO (search engine optimization), you should use the words that are most common in searches and the search engines will send people to you.

I immediately thought of my daughter’s homework assignment. The users of this site must feel like her, trying to weave the words generated by this site into their prose. I wondered how odd that would be. So, I decided to try it, just so I could get a taste of what my daughter went through. And also, because I thought it would be kinda fun.

Being “the ASIC guy”, what word other than “ASIC” could I have entered. After entering my keyword and my email address, I received an email with the 10,000 most common search terms that include “ASIC”. I decided to focus on the top 50 search terms, separating them out into individual words and listed them on a sheet of paper.

Now, without further ado, is Harry’s SEO Homework:

 __________

The alarm rang.

I lurched up out of bed, already in a panic, staring at the clock to see what time it was.

11:00am. Damn!

I took care of the basic biological necessities, then threw on my jeans, a T-shirt, and my brand new ASIC Gel-Kayano running chaussures. At least the company I worked for didn’t have a dress code and they didn’t care what shoes I wore. Designing ASICs and FPGAs is much easier when I’m comfortable.

I had been assigned to the verification team. My job was to search for bugs and to wrestle them down. Thankfully, I was able to use Verilog and System-Verilog for this project. Not like those VLSI design days, when I, and so many of my fellow engineers, had to wear a tie to impress the boss and had to use VHDL because they made us . A language by any other name is better than VHDL. Sure, VHDL is more structured. But, Verilog is a whole lot easier to use.

I’d been searching in some DCT4 code for one particular bug that had eluded me for 15 days. It should have been implemented in analog, but some Einstein decided digital logic was easier to design, so here I was.  It was me vs the bug. And the bug was winning!

Then it hit me. I was looking at the wrong register!

I felt a surge of power as I unlocked and modified my testbench. The combination of sleeplessness and Mountain Dew made me delirious. For a moment, I thought I was wearing a women’s dress and Onitsuka ASICs while playing volleyball in a prison cell. Gotta stop hanging out with those guys from the UK who watch Monty Python all the time.

I acted quickly, changing an “lt” to a “gt“, invoking the recompile flow on the new code, and kicking off the regression sim.

The simulation worked and I breathed a sigh of relief. My boss had threatened to bring in some hotshot design services company that he’d found on a website if I couldn’t find this bug. The nimbus that had been floating over my head for weeks was gone.

Now I could keep my job.

And now it was time for the layout guys to sweat!

__________

Phew! That was a lot harder than I thought. (Especially since those ASICS running shoes get a lot more hits apparently than the ASICs I usually write about). But now that I wrote and published that story, I expect I’ll be #1 on Google Search in the morning:-)

To be fair, I think there is certainly some value in understanding how people find this blog through various search terms. It helps me to understand what kind of information they are looking for and that helps me choose better topics to write about. But, taken to the extreme, if I write content for the search engines instead of all of you (my readers), then I’m in trouble. You may find me, but you won’t like what you find. And that would be much worse.

If anyone else wants to give this a try just for grins, just go to Wordstream and try it out. Just let me know where to find your “masterpiece”.

harry the ASIC guy

My former-EDA-salesperson friend had just finished his lunch when he leaned back in his chair and said:

“Listen. You’ve been on both sides, in EDA and a customer. Lemme ask you a question. Do you think sales people are really needed?”

At first, I was really shocked to hear this question, especially from someone who had been in EDA sales for the last 10 years. After all, you don’t hear plumbers asking if plumbers are needed. Or doctors. Or auto mechanics. Even folks in professions that are experiencing job losses, such as journalism, hardly ever question the value they bring.

I let the question sink in for a few seconds, which seemed like minutes, and answered the only way I could. With another question, “how do you mean?”

As it turns out, my friend was not really having a deep identity crisis. He was just trying to understand why EDA companies, including his former employer, seem to view direct sales people, especially him, as expendable costs, easily replaced with inside sales, marketing campaigns, and online sales methods.

Put that way, it’s an interesting question to consider. Although I have never been a “bag carrying” sales person, I did spend the better party of 14 years on the EDA side in some sort of sales support or semi-sales role. And I still have many friends in sales or applications engineering roles. Were my friends and my old jobs becoming obsolete? Are new technologies, ones that connect customers with companies directly (blogs, forums, etc.), making sales people unnecessary?

On the other hand, I’ve spent the last 3 years of my career back on the other side of the fence, in the customer world. I’ve had the opportunity for many interactions with folks whose shoes I used to wear. Certainly, some of these folks do provide value, marshaling corporate resources to address a tool issue or providing methodology assistance for a new technology. There are also the dirty parts of the job. Without sales people’s efforts, many opportunities would die an early death in the hands of lawyers, accountants, and purchasing reps, or at least they would not occur as quickly as they do.

At the same time, we cannot deny that technology is replacing the need for sales people in many of our other daily purchases, especially consumer electronics. We do all of our research online. We compare product specs on web sites. We seek out product reviews by trusted tech gadget bloggers and ratings by actual customers. We compare prices online and make our purchases with a click. No sales person in the loop.

You’d be correct in pointing out that buying an EDA tool is not like buying a digital camera. Still, there are changes going on in EDA as well. This blog and those of many of my colleagues are now considered product research resources. The work I’ve been doing recently with Xuropa has been aimed at moving part of the sales process, specifically product evaluations, online.  And forums such as TechBites are springing up to provide independent opinions. So maybe there is some cause for my friend’s concern.

As I’ve had time to consider this question since our lunch, I’ve come to feel that salespeople are still needed and will be for some time to come in EDA. Good salespeople know how to find customers, to manage sales campaigns, to manage complex issues, and to ultimately “close the deal”. However, many of their up-front functions will be taken over by other methods, driven by thechnology. As a result, the salesperson will increasingly encounter a more educated customer, one that knows he has alternatives, and one that feels more in control of the sales process than before. Salespeople will have to adapt to that type of customer.

We finished up our lunch and our discussion without reaching any definite conclusions. On the way to our cars I asked him, “mind if I blog about it?”

“Sure.”

So, what do you think? Are sales people really needed?

harry the ASIC guy

To hear long time fan Tony Seminary tell the story, he was embarrassed by the Oregon Ducks performance when they lost to Boise State on the opening night of the 2009 college football season. Not only did they play a sloppy game, gaining only 152 total yards, making only 6 first downs, and committing 2 turnovers, but the whole nation got to see one of their star players punch out a Boise State player on the field after the game.

So what did Tony do? He wrote an email to new Ducks head coach Chip Kelly asking for him to reimburse him for the cost of his round trip from Portland to Boise.

So what did Chip Kelly do? He wrote an email back asking “what’s your address?” A few days later, Tony received a personal check from Chip Kelly for the $439 that Tony had requested.

This happened a few weeks ago, but it just hit the news this week and has gone, dare I say the word, ‘viral’. Among the results of this are the following:

• Customer Loyalty - Tony Seminary sent the check back and has been quoted as saying “I think of Coach Kelly as a totally different person now, I have a different bond with him now thanks to what happened. Let’s just say he lost every game as an Oregon coach. You would never hear me calling for his head. It just wouldn’t happen. The guy showed an incredible amount of class”.
• Team Loyalty - Said Seminary, “I now know why his kids would run through a wall for that guy, because who does what he did, right? That is simply amazing.”
• Personal Reputation - In blogs and articles all over, Chip Kelly is being hailed not only for doing what he did, but for doing it quietly without drawing attention. As one blog said “Chip Kelly, a man of his word.”
• School Reputation - I don’t have any evidence of this as yet, it’s too early, but certainly some of this will rub off on the University of Oregon, in a good way.

The good news was that Oregon had put in charge a man with integrity and they gave him the freedom to respond as he saw fit. But how would most schools and companies have handled something like this? It would have probably gone something like this:

1. Coach receives email and forwards it to the legal department.
2. Lawyers craft a carefully worded response indicating that Oregon regrets the loss but it is not responsible for incidental damages according to the relevant terms and conditions on the ticket that Mr. Seminary tacitly agreed to and should have read.
3. Mr. Seminary vows never to go to another Ducks football game again. He then goes online and tells hundreds of his friends who are Ducks fans the story.
4. One of his friends writes a Oregon Ducks blog and posts the story and the text of the Oregon response email. ESPN picks it up and shows it on Sportscenter.
5. Hundreds of Ducks fans come to the next game with signs saying something like “Win, or give me my money back”.
6. Top recruit hears the story and decides that he’d rather not go to Oregon. Chooses USC instead.
7. Athletic Director resigns.

No matter what business you are in, hire good people with good judgment and give them the freedom to make the customer happy. That kind of service is “priceless”.

harry the ASIC guy

As a kid, I always dreamed of being interviewed after hitting the game winning homerun or jump shot or throwing the game winning touchdown pass. Well, at this point in my life, the likelihood of those dreams is pretty much zilch. But, fortunately, I’ve been able to achieve something almost as great. A one-hour interview on Dee McCrorey’s Big Dreamers! The Reinvent Success Show.

So, after a full weekend of watching college football and then NFL football, and listening to those other guys getting interviewed after the game winning touchdowns, you can sit down at 6pm PDT, and unwind as Dee McCrorey, Risk Guru, Innovation Catalyst, and Business Coach asks me about my career from no-name engineer to “Harry the ASIC Guy”. You can always listen to the recording afterward if the time is inconvenient, but if you tune in live you can actually call into the show and ask questions, make comments, remind me of the $10 I borrowed for lunch and never gave back, whatever.

Honestly, I’m both flattered and embarrassed to have this opportunity. I met Dee just this past July at DAC in the Synopsys Conversation Central booth and we hit it off right away. Even after the sessions were over, Dee stayed and continued to ask questions trying to dig deeper and get at the core the topics we were discussing. She really has a desire to get to the essence of things which is a great asset for an interviewer, so I’m looking forward to some tough questions. She also has a thriving consulting business helping professionals reinvent their careers, both within corporations and individually, so I’m looking forward to working with her professionally as well.

For more information on the show, you can go here. I hope you can join me.

harry the ASIC guy

I got an email last week from one the readers of this blog that observed “it would be interesting to learn how to manage both blogs while doing justice to your readers.” He was of course referring to my new blog on Xuropa that I write in addition to this one.

Indeed, this was a concern of mine that I had considered carefully before embarking on the other blog … or so I thought. The other day I wrote a new blog post about how designers want to actually use tools hands-on rather than just listen to product marketing pitches, or webinars, or podcasts. I originally wrote the post for this blog, then decided that it made more sense for the Xuropa blog, and ended up publishing it there (here’s the link). But it could have really gone on either one with small adjustments. I can see that this is now going to be more difficult than I thought.I did a little research online to see how other bloggers are handling writing multiple blogs. One of the suggestions was to set down the objectives of each of the blogs so I could be more clear in my mind and to the readers. I think that’s a good idea. So here goes:

• The Xuropa blog will be focused on ways that EDA companies can do more with less, like cloud computing, online tool access, and software-as-a-service. It will also be written for an audience of EDA sales and marketing professionals. If you are in EDA, you’ll want to subscribe to that blog.
• The harry the ASIC guy blog will include lots of other content and is hopefully valuable for people in all aspects of the semiconductor industry. I’ll discuss general engineering trends, quarterly reports from EDA companies, technical topics, and industry news. If you are a designer, you’ll want to subscribe to this blog.

I’m guessing that many of you will be interested in both topic areas and so it is OK to subscribe to the Xuropa blog and subscribe to this blog. You have my permission. After some time you may find that you are only interested in one of the blogs. That’s OK too, just unsubscribe to the one that doesn’t meet your needs.

Another suggestion was to set realistic expectations for how frequently I’d be publishing a new post. I think that is a good idea as well. I will continue to post on this blog roughly once per week as I have in the past. For some time I was actually closer to 2 posts per week but I have fallen back to once a week and that is about what I can handle now. The other blog is shared with some other folks from Xuropa so I will probably publish there every other week. We’ll see how that goes.

I’d like to ask you each a favor as well. Please help me keep to my commitment. I’ve already made this commitment of public record here, so that alone will provide some pressure. But if I start to post too infrequently or the quality slips or goes off track, let me know. Leave a comment or send me an email.

I would also like to make this blog a little more fresh and collaborative. I’ve said in the past that I learn more from you folks than you learn from me. You are working in hundreds of companies with thousands of years of collective experience. I’d like to see if we can tap into that for all our benefit. So here’s the deal:

• If you have an idea for a blog post, let me know. Leave it as a comment or send me an email. I’ll make sure I give you full credit (unless you want to be anonymous) and link back to your website or LinkedIn profile.
• If you’d like to write a guest blog post, I’m open to that as well. The more viewpoints the better.

Of course, not every suggestion will be used and not every offer of a guest blog post will be accepted. I’ll still make that decision to make sure the content is of high quality. But I won’t censor anything just because I disagree.

Well, I guess that’s it. We’re going to try this 2 blog thing and see how it goes. Wish me luck.

harry the ASIC guy