harry … the ASIC guy

Last week I initiated a poll of verification methodologies being used for functional verification of ASICs. Unlike other polls or surveys, this one was done in a very “open” fashion using a website that allows everyone to view the raw data. In this way, anyone can analyze the data and draw the conclusions that make sense to them, and those conclusions can be challenged and debated based on the data.

What happened next was interesting. Within 48 hours, the poll had received almost 200 responses from all over the world. It had garnered the attention of the big EDA vendors who solicited their supporters to vote. And, as a result, had became a focal point for shenanigans from over-zealous VMM and OVM fans.  I had several long nights digging through the data and now I am ready to present the results.

As promised, here is the raw data in PDF format and as an Excel workbook. The only change I have made is to remove the names of the individual 249 respondents.

In summary, the results are as follows:

(Note: The total is more than the 249 respondents because one respondent could be using more than one methodology.)

Regarding the big 3 vendors, the data shows a remarkable consistency with Gary Smith’s market share data. There are 85 respondents planning to use the Synopsys methodologies (VMM,RVM, or Vera) and there are 150 respondents planning to use the Mentor or Cadence methodologies (OVM, AVM, eRM, e). That represents 36% for Synopsys and 64% for Mentor/Cadence. Gary’s data shows Synopsys with 34% market share, Mentor with 35%, and Cadence with 30%.

I’ll share some more insights in upcoming posts. In the meantime, please feel free to offer any insights that you have through your comments. Remember, you too have access to the raw data. This invitation includes the EDA vendors. And feel free to challenge my conclusions … but back it up with data!

harry the ASIC guy

Quick update for everyone…

Regarding the Verification Methodology Poll I started the other day, I was able to go through the log files and identify the obvious malicious activity.  There was a string of deletes and changes of VMM votes to OVM/e votes. Then a string of deletes of OVM votes. I’m going to add back the original entries to make the data whole again.

In the meantime, the obvious malicious activity has subsided, and now there is only a trickle of clearly valid votes coming in. It’s just like listening for the popcorn to stop popping, when I see that the votes slow down to a certain rate, I’ll do my tallies and publish the results.

There have been questions raised regarding my motivations for doing this poll.  Some felt that I had some hidden agenda and some even thought that I was some sort of paid shill for one of the vendors. If you are a regular reader of my blog or if you know me, then you know that’s not true.  If you don’t know me, then ask around.

At the risk of sounding defensive, my goal was purely to conduct an “open” survey of the verification methodologies being used because this has been such a hot topic this past year, because DVCon is coming up and this would be good information, and because one of my readers suggested it and I thought it was a good idea.The idea of using Doodle was in order that everyone can view the raw data, something you rarely or never get to see when vendors and other organizations conduct polls and then release only the results that suit them best. In this way, anyone could analyze the raw data and draw the conclusions that made sense, and those conclusions could be challenged based on the raw data. The mistake I made was not realizing how easily those who, unlike me, actually had an agenda could vandalize the data.

There have also been questions raised regarding the validity of this poll and how “scientific” it is after all that has occurred. I think they are valid concerns and certainly, if I had to do this over again, I’d fix some things to prevent multiple voting and malicious behavior. Still, as I look at the interim results, they are similar to what I had expected. Each vendor lobbied their constituencies, so the playing field is level. It will be interesting to compare this result to DVCon surveys from the vendors, from DVCon itself, and from John Cooley to see if there is consistency.

Finally, to those of you who legitimately voted, I thank you for participating openly and I apologize that the results will always be subject to some doubt. I hope you don’t feel you wasted your time.

harry the ASIC guy

OK.  This will be short and sweet!

The poll I set up the other day was getting interesting and meaningful responses related to the verification methodologies being used. FORTUNATELY, I saved a snapshot of this data as it was coming in.

UNFORTUNATELY, I apparently did not do enough due diligence with respect to the Doodle site and neglected to realize that there is a way to vandalize the data.  Apparently, that is what started happening later in the day, to the point where this has now become a poll-war between the forces of OVM and the forces of VMM.  I won’t go so far as to name names, but you know who you are.

I feel bad for those who provided honest data.  Thank you for doing so and having faith in this poll. I have a snapshot that I feel is reasonably uncorrupted and I will still publish those results once I remove data that I feel was not entered in good faith.

I may have a way to find out if any of the EDA vendors were involved in this vandalism, so I encourage you to chill out and not make it any worse.

And if you were involved … GROW UP!!!

harry the ASIC guy

My day was over and I was riding in the elevator on my way home from work. The other passengers had left so I was the only one. Then I heard it. It was a woman’s voice and it was very faint.

I quickly glanced at my cell phone. Off.

I searched in my bag. Nothing.

Running out of options, my eyes wandered over to the elevator control panel and the emergency phone box under the buttons. The little door was unlocked so I opened it slowly and the voice grew louder.

“If you would like to reduce your interest rate, dial 1 now”.

Talk about interruption marketing!!!

Next thing you know, they’ll be advertising in the restrooms!!!

And you thought EDA sales guys were annoying

harry the ASIC guy

How much would you pay to be in the audience for some of the most thought provoking conference presentations from some of the greatest minds in the world. Here’s your ticket.

It’s FREE … completely FREE.

No registration. No airplanes. No hotels. No rental car.

While you sit at home, on a Sunday afternoon, drinking a beer.

Of course, nothing can completely replace the face to face interaction at a real conference. But in these “hard times” and with the technologies like flip cameras making video ubiquitous, it’s a damn good alternative.

It should be interesting to see what comes of DVCon, SNUG, and DAC this year in this regard. My prediction is that you will see an explosion of coverage. Videos (authorized and pirated) of presentations and floor and suite demos and interviews on flip cameras. Blog posts. Twitter feeds with customer hashtags.

What do you think?

harry the ASIC guy

Coffee Shop

This past Saturday I went to grab a cup of coffee at the local mom-n-pop coffee shop that I really like. There were no stirrers so I told the server that they were out.

“Yeah, we’ve been out for a few days. You can use a straw”.

“Why don’t you just go to the Smart and Final or the Von’s 30 feet away and grab a box”, I asked.

“I’m just the server, that’s not my job”.

Electrician

On Sunday I was talking to Chuck, one of the other parents at the YMCA Adventure guides induction ceremony and boat regatta. Chuck works as an installer for AT&T and also does electrical jobs when he gets a chance.  He’s a hard worker, putting in six 12-14 hour days each week.

As we talked, I suggested that he could set out on his own, make more money and work less hours. Like Joe the Plumber.

“I don’t need the headaches. If something goes wrong on a job today, it’s not my problem. It’s my bosses problem. If I own a business, then it’s all my problem.  I’d rather someone just give me the job and I do what I’m told.”

My Client’s Large Company

I was trying to install Office Communicator the other day and there was something wrong with my account on the server. I called IT and the woman on the line tried to help me but could not figure out what was wrong.  So she closed my ticket, the one with her name on it, and opened a new one for a specialist in Office Communicator to look into it.

About a week later, someone else in IT called me up to help me with my issue.  He was able to figure out what was wrong, but lacked the permissions to make the fix.  So he closed out my ticket, the one with his name on it, and opened a new one for the person with permissions to fix the problem.

A few days later, I rebooted my laptop and Office Communicator was now working.  Later that day I got 3 emails from IT requesting me to fill out a short survey regarding the resolution of my issue.

A Person I Work With

The other day I urgently needed help to run an analysis on a chip I’m working on. So I asked one of the people on the team who knows how to do it quickly.

“That’s  not one of the things I’m responsible for.”

______________________

Am I the only person not afflicted by the “not my job” disease? Has this really become such an ingrained part of American and corporate life?

I’m sorry, I just don’t think that way. If I see a problem, then it’s my problem.  Maybe I’m anal or a perfectionist or neurotic and maybe I need to let go.  But I’m just not wired that way. And I don’t understand people who are.

harry the ASIC guy

Since Cadence decided to disappoint us by canceling their earnings announcement and conference call at the last minute, it gives me a chance to share some other cool stuff going on.

Seth Godin released his new book Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us.  If you are a Seth Godin fan, then you’ll need to get this book.  If you don’t know who he is, then you need to get this book too. Trust me.  You can order it on Amazon, or download it on iTunes or get it for Free at Audible.com.

Thanks to Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen for pointing out a great Slideshare presentation on the credit crisis.

Last, on the topic of Software-as-a-Service for EDA, I wanted to point out a new demo on PDTi’s SpectaReg product. The demo is a little stiff, especially the pre-written copy. I’d rather hear the developer and a user speak honestly and passionately about why this is a cool product. But the fact that Jeremy Ralph is offering this product as SaaS makes him a kindred spirit, so I’ll cut him some slack. Good vibes!

That’s all for now.

harry the ASIC guy

During these last few weeks of the subprime mortgage crisis in the US, many of us have become all too familiar with the term “leverage” as it applies to those entities that used to be called investment banks.  That kind of leverage is very powerful and is also very dangerous, as we all found out.

There is a 2nd type of leverage that we engineers learned about in basic physics. As Archimedes once said, “Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.”

But there is 3rd type of leverage that is “the power or ability to act or to influence people, events, decisions, etc.” Some people call it ROI. I’d like to share with you three examples that recently came to my attention whereby one small EDA company in our industry is using the principles of leverage to try to “move the world”.

Productive EDA

I came across these guys through my Google Reader when the President, Jeremy Ralph, posted the following new product announcement to the OVM World blogs.  Jeremy cleverly used the power of OVM World to reach hundreds (thousands?) of potential customers.  And what did he invest? Only the time it took to write the blog post and put it up.

That’s leverage!

But wait, there’s more.  Jeremy caught my interest when he called the SpectaReg product a Web2.0 application, so I clicked to view the press release and was pleasantly surprised to see that their “products are available online, at lower cost, as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)”. Well, I had been fooled just last week into thinking that Cadence was completely entering the SaaS market, so I wanted to make sure. After all, as President George W. Bush once cautioned, “fool me once, shame on…shame on you…you fool me, you can’t get fooled again.” So I spoke to “President Ralph” on the phone, and indeed, this truly is a Web-based Software-as-a-Service, pay-per-use offering. Using the power of the internet and SaaS, his company is able to deploy its software to virtually any customer of any size anywhere, all from their office in Vancouver, BC.

That’s leverage!

But wait, there’s still more. I pointed Jeremy to xuropa.com, a recently launched online electronic design community and tradeshow platform, that I covered back in June and again three weeks ago. To his credit, Jeremy was already aware of Xuropa. I’m not sure where that will go, but his small EDA company would be able to reach even more potential customers worldwide and provide product training and evaluations through their online labs.

That’s leverage!

Leverage can be your friend. These new media business-to-business (B2B) strategies can enable smaller EDA companies like Productive EDA, which is exactly the type of company that I was considering when I wrote on my blog three weeks ago:

The pieces are coming together for a revolution in EDA. Like most revolutions, it is starting small, hardly noticed by the big guys on the block. In the next 5 years, it will change our industry forever by leveling the playing field, allowing smaller EDA companies to compete with larger ones, giving customers greater flexibility on how and when they access tools and which vendor’s tools they use.

Indeed, leverage can be your friend.

harry the ASIC guy

Last Saturday, my daughter earned her orange belt in Karate. So we decided to treat her to some ice cream at Baskin Robbins.

You would think that an ice cream shop just down the street from the YMCA on a Saturday afternoon in August would be packed with happy chocolate coated faces.  Yet, we were the only customers.  Strange….

As we ate our ice cream and I walked around I started to realize that something was odd.  See if you can guess from these pictures I took with my cell phone…

I’m sure the owner had a good reason for each of these signs. But taken together, the impression I got was that she didn’t trust her employees and she didn’t trust her customers. In short, she didn’t consider how her customers’ might interpret or misinterpret the message that these signs were supposed to convey.

Emails can be the same.

When you write an email, you know exactly what you mean to say. But emails are just words and words are open to misinterpretation. If you write something in haste or just the wrong way, you can give a false impression, even if you don’t mean to. As a simple example, here is an email that I received recently from a former co-worker to whom I had not spoken in over 10 years:

My son’s high school robotics team has a competition at Northridge this week, so we’re going to be in town.  Here is our rough itinerary (below).  Would love to meet you and Joyce and any others at some point on the itinerary.   Please make suggestions for an activity (spice it up a bit — think like a high school kid).

I’m sure that Dave just wanted to catch up on old times.  But I felt like I was being commissioned to plan an activity that was going to keep his high school age son, whom I had never met, from being bored. Not exactly what I had expected.

To be fair, I’ve done this too. What makes email so powerful, is that it is quick, easy, and immediate. And that is also the danger when it comes to misinterpretation.  Back in the “old days”, when we had to hand write and mail letters, we had plenty of time to choose our words carefully and read and rewrite what we had written. With email, you can just hit “send” and off it goes.

So, how can you and I keep from making this mistake?

A good rule of thumb, before sending an email, is to read it and ask “how might this email be misinterpreted”? Read it like you’re reading it for the first time. Put yourself in the shoes of the recipients. Try to anticipate what they might misinterpret and fix it. Especially if the email is important or sensitive. Especially if you are delivering bad news.

Better yet, if there is any doubt, pick up the phone or get off your butt and walk over to have a face-to-face conversation. And if it’s a real sensitive topic, discuss it over an ice cream.

harry the ASIC guy

About 5 years ago at Synopsys, I set up an internal email alias so that everybody working with one of our top customers, Qualcomm, could communicate important information to the entire team. All get on the same page. Make sure the left hand knew what the right hand was doing. Make sure we were communicating the same data and recommendations. Account managers … applications engineers … consultants … R&D … all working as one well oiled machine. I must say, it was a great idea … on paper.

One morning, after driving down to the San Diego office, I hopped onto a 10 AM conference call and logged into my email. As I watched my Inbox load, I noticed that there were about half a dozen messages sent that morning back and forth between two individuals who reported to me on the Qualcomm team. All regarding the same subject. Each one sent less than 5 minutes after the previous email.

As I settled into the conference call, I took a look at the latest email in the thread to get a sense of what was going on. Apparently, there was a disagreement between two members of our team as to the correct approach to addressing some methodology issue.  That’s fine.  People disagree.  But this was different.

Have you ever been at a party and a couple starts arguing in front of everyone?  At first you ignore it and make believe you’re not aware.  But then the tone gets angrier and the language gets personal and the voices get louder. Until you can’t ignore it and everybody stops what they are doing to watch in embarrassment what is happening in public that should have been private.

That’s exactly what was happening on this email thread.  As emails 7, 8, and 9 came in, the tone got angrier and the language got personal and the voices got LOUDER. And thanks to the email alias I had set up, there were now about 25 other people watching this “couples spat”.

I had to stop this, but I was stuck on this damn conference call !!!

Forget about the actual issue. This was now a matter of saving these two individuals from the ridicule of others on that email alias that were witnessing this boxing match. I sent urgent emails to the two individuals asking them to stop the emails and that I’d speak to them at 11 AM.

Email #10. #11. #12.

Mercifully, the call ended a little early and I was able to reach the consultants on their cell phones. One of the individuals was a contrarian, so from my previous post on the subject you know that:

1. If everyone else wants to take road A, he wants to take road B.
2. If everyone else wants to take road B, he wants to take road C.
3. If you’ve got a plan, he’ll tell you why it won’t work.
4. Once he takes a stand on an issue, he’ll never give up.
5. He doesn’t really care what others think about him.
6. Every battle is worth fighting … to the death.

Bottom line, he thought there was nothing wrong with “having it out” over email with everyone else copied.  In fact, this was good documentation since everybody on the team could now see the rationale of how this decision was arrived at. He was just trying to get to the right answer and can’t be bothered about having to worry about other people’s feelings.

The other individual just couldn’t resist replying to the emails since they came so fast. And he totally forgot that everyone else was being copied. He was pretty embarrassed.

In the end, the damage to these individual’s reputations was not that bad. As it turns out, the one individual already had a reputation as a hothead and contrarian and the other was more the victim than the aggressor. Still, I overheard comments in the office that day about this “tiff” and, in the end, the issue was not really addressed.

The morale of this story is that there are two rules:

1) If it takes more than 3 or 4 emails back and forth, then pick up the phone or walk over to the other person’s office. Email is a very inefficient and slow way to have a discussion or solve a problem compared to good old fashioned talking about it. Still, sometimes, and this was apparently one of those times, people just find the allure of the quick email response too appealing to resist.

2) If you break rule #1, don’t be stupid enough to copy everybody else.

harry the ASIC guy