harry … the ASIC guy

There’s going to be a small gathering of luminaries in Monterey this week. And no, it’s not the jellyfish at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/warthog9/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

It’s the Electronic Design Processes Symposium Workshop. This will be my first time attending and it will be very interesting on several accounts.

First, everyone who has attended in the past has said that it’s truly unique in the industry. It’s not really a conference but a workshop, a small gathering of the best and brightest in EDA exchanging their research and ideas. With only 25-50 participants, it’s not uncommon for someone to  stand up and challenge the presenter or for spontaneous discussions to break out during sessions. It’s not uncommon to meet people who have been thinking about the same problems you’ve considered or someone who has been thinking about problems you never thought existed. And it’s not uncommon to walk away with new insights and revelations and ideas.

Second, there probably are very few, if any, EDA customers attending. This is an EDA workshop for EDA people. There is no trade show. There are no booths to set up. There are no big press releases or sales guys walking up to shake your hand or schlocky giveaways. I imagine that DAC probably started out this way back in the 1960s, but DAC is now more of a trade show that a workshop. This will be back to the grass roots of EDA.

Third, I am going to be moderating one of the sessions, something I’ve not done before (except at my own round table). I’ll be moderating the session entitled “Moving to a Brave New World” which includes a presentation by James Colgan of Xuropa on cloud computing. Obviously, I’m a little biased on that topic, but I’ll try not to let that influence my moderation. I’m sure this and all the other sessions will be very interesting.

Last, I’m going to be traveling with my family. It’s spring break week and so we’re heading up the coast to visit Monterey for a few days, then visit some friends up in Danville. Fortunately there is plenty to do in Monterey and the hotel is right on the beach, so they’ll be fine. So, if you want to meet me or my family, come on over. Registration is still open.

We promise we won’t sting.

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

www.flickr.com/photos/cayusa/ CC BY-NC 2.0

In the almost 2 years since I started this blog, I’ve been paying pretty close attention to the EDA industry. And one of the themes I keep hearing goes something like this:

“There’s no more innovation in EDA”
I hear it on blogs and on Twitter. I hear it from design engineers, from consultants, from old media, from new media, and even from EDA people.

One person I know, someone who has been an executive at an EDA company and a venture capitalist, says that EDA is persona non-grata for VC folks. Maybe you can start a “lifestyle company” doing EDA, but don’t expect any more companies like Synopsys to come along.

And then, about a month ago, I get an email from someone out of the blue. He’s got an idea for a new EDA tool that would transform the industry. He’s been in the semiconductor business. He’s developed EDA tools. He knows everybody there is to know. And he’s not able to get anyone’s attention. As he puts it, nobody is working on anything “disruptive”. They are all doing “incremental improvements” that are “woefully inadequate”.

I spent about an hour talking to him on the phone. As I got off the phone, I was not sure what to make of the conversation. He was either insane or a visionary. He was either deluded or optimistic. He was either obsessed or determined. I’m still not sure which.

And that is what makes this industry so much frickin’ fun! You never know. That crazy idea of turning VHDL into gate-level schematics … who figured that would be the biggest innovation in design in decades?

Then, last week, I heard about this event/gathering/workshop happening during DVCon at the San Jose Doubletree. Presented by EDA veterans Jim Hogan and Paul McLellan. It’s called “So, you want to start an EDA Company. Here’s how …” And I immediately thought of my new friend with the idea about a new EDA company. This is exactly what he was looking for … an audience of people with open minds who were asking “why not” instead of “why”.

Maybe you also have a crazy idea. Maybe it really is crazy. Or maybe not.

I invited him and I hope I can get there myself. If so, I think you might want to come too.  You might just meet the founder of the next Synopsys. Here’s the skinny: San Jose Doubletree on Feb 23 at 6:30-7:30 in the Oak Ballroom.

I’ve also written a little prediction of what I expect to hear on the Xuropa Blog. Who knows? Maybe the naysayers are right and EDA is Dead. Then again, maybe not. I, for one, am dying to find out which.

harry the ASIC guy

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stinkiepinkie_infinity/ / CC BY 2.0

In case you missed it, there was a fascinating thread on Olivier Coudert’s Blog over the last month or so. Olivier struck a chord with his post entitled “Why Service Companies Will Eat Up EDA“, which put forward the case that the design services industry would soon emerge as the primary implementers of complex SoC designs.

Olivier’s vision is that SoC design will become a commodity to systems companies whose differentiation would be in their system-level design and algorithms. Implementation from RTL or netlist to GDSII would be performed by these design services companies that know the methodologies, tools, and target technologies better. These design services companies could also leverage economies of scale by sharing licenses among multiple projects and selecting from a large pool of accessible IP. Olivier pointed out that even today, the design services industry is twice the size of EDA and that is likely to grow.

According to some of the comments, competition to pure design services companies could come from the EDA companies or the foundries. The large EDA companies have the advantage of free tools at their disposal and so can gain a price advantage over independent companies. Their intimate knowledge of the tools and flows and access to tools experts in R&D also enhance their attractiveness. Meanwhile, foundries could step into this space as well, amortizing the cost of design with the revenue from production volume. UMC has been doing this for quite some time with Faraday Technology Corporation and TSMC with Global Unichip.

There is a third set of players that is worth watching as well. Last week, OpenSilicon, a “fabless ASIC vendor” acquired Silicon Logic Engineering, a “front-end design house”. Together, they can potentially offer “spec to parts” services, a much broader offering than most other players.

As a coincidence, I had a conversation this week with someone whose been in the semiconductor biz for close to 3 decades. He’s got an idea, and also some technology already developed, that would enable companies to design SoCs at a very high-level and very quickly. Although the key to this capability would be some nifty tool, perhaps he’s better off using the capability to do design services rather than enter the EDA space. It seems Olivier would give him that advice as well.

What do I think?

When the automobile first came out, you had to be a mechanic to own one. There were no auto mechanic shops or service centers. If something went wrong or if you wanted to tune the performance, you had to be able to lift the hood, take out your tools chest and get to work. Over time, the auto service industry emerged until today when only the true automobile enthusiast or race car driver does much more than change his own oil. For almost all of us, we get much better service at a lower price than if we did the work ourselves.

Of course, chip design is not the same as car servicing, but I think the same principles apply. For the majority of the market, they will be able to get better results with less cost using a design services company. After all, how much do you really need to optimize your design and silicon when silicon is so abundant. For the rest that absolutely need the highest performance and only trust themselves, they will continue to buy the tools and do the work. What will be the split and how long it will take to get there is anybody’s guess. And when we get there, will there be enough business to support an EDA industry? We’ll see.

harry the ASIC guy

http://www.flickr.com/photos/optical_illusion/ / CC BY 2.0

What’s a blog without some sort of obligatory year end TOP 10 list?

So, without further ado, here is my list of the TOP 10 events, happenings, occurrences, observations that I will remember from 2009. This is my list, from my perspective, of what I will remember. Here goes:

1. Verification Survey - Last February, as DVCon was approaching, I thought it would be interesting to post a quickie survey to see what verification languages and methodologies were being used. Naively, I did not realize to what extent the fans of the various camps would go to rig the results in their favor. Nonetheless, the results ended up very interesting and I learned a valuable lesson on how NOT to do a survery.
2. DVCon SaaS and Cloud Computing EDA Roundtable - One of the highlights of the year was definitely the impromptu panel that I assembled during DVCon to discuss Software-as-a-Service and Cloud Computing for EDA tools. My thanks to the panel guests, James Colgan (CEO @ Xuropa), Jean Brouwers (Consultant to Xuropa),  Susan Peterson (Verification IP Marketing Manager @ Cadence), Jeremy Ralph (CEO @ PDTi), Bill Alexander (VP Marketing @ Blue Pearl Software), Bill Guthrie (VP Marketing @ Numetrics). Unfortunately, the audio recording of the event was not of high enough quality to post, but you can read about it from others at the following locations:
   

   > 3 separate blog posts from Joe Hupcey (1, 2, 3)

   > A nice mention from Peggy Aycinena

   > Numerous other articles and blog posts throughout the year that were set in motion, to some extent, by this roundtable

3. Predictions to the contrary, Magma is NOT dead. Cadence was NOT sold. Oh, and EDA is NOT dead either.
4. John Cooley IS Dead - OK, he’s NOT really dead. But this year was certainly a turning point for his influence in the EDA space. It started off with John’s desperate attempt at a Conversation Central session at DAC to tell bloggers that their blog sucks and convince them to just send him their thoughts. For those who took John up on his offer by sending their thoughts, they would have waited 4 months to see them finally posted by John in his December DAC Trip report. I had a good discussion on this topic with John earlier this year, which he asked me to keep “off the record”. Let’s just say, he just doesn’t get it and doesn’t want to get it.
5. The Rise of the EDA Bloggers.
6. FPGA Taking Center Stage - It started back in March when Gartner issued a report stated that there were 30 FPGA design starts for every ASIC start. That number seemed very high to me and to others, but that did not stop this 30:1 ratio from being quoted as fact in all sorts of FPGA marketing materials throughout the year. On the technical side, it was a year where the issues of verification of large FPGAs came front-and-center and where a lot of ASIC people started transitioning to FPGA.
7. Engineers Looking For Work - This was one of the more unfortunate trends that I will remember from 2009 and hopefully 2010 will be better. Personally, I had difficulty finding work between projects. DAC this year seemed to be as much about finding work as finding tools. A good friend of mine spent about 4 months looking for work until he finally accepted a job at 30% less pay and with a 1.5 hour commute because he “has to pay the bills”. A lot of my former EDA sales and AE colleagues have been laid off. Some have been looking for the right position for over a year. Let’s hope 2010 is a better year.
8. SaaS and Cloud Computing for EDA - A former colleague of mine, now a VP of Sales at one of the small but growing EDA companies, came up to me in the bar during DAC one evening and stammered some thoughts regarding my predictions of SaaS and Cloud Computing for EDA. “It will never happen”. He may be right and I may be a bit biased, but this year I think we started to see some of the beginnings of these technologies moving into EDA. On a personal note, I’m involved in one of those efforts at Xuropa. Look for more developments in 2010.
9. Talk of New EDA Business Models - For years, EDA has bemoaned the fact that the EDA industry captures so little of the value ($5B) of the much larger semiconductor industry ($250B) that it enables. At the DAC Keynote, Fu-Chieh Hsu of TSMC tried to convince everyone that the solution for EDA is to become part of some large TSMC ecosystem in which TSMC would reward the EDA industry like some sort of charitable tax deduction. Others talked about EDA companies having more skin in the game with their customers and being compensated based on their ultimate product success. And of course there is the SaaS business model I’ve been talking about. We’ll see if 2010 brings any of these to fruition.
10. The People I Got to Meet and the People Who Wanted to Meet Me- One of the great things about having a blog is that I got to meet so many interesting people that I would never have had an opportunity to even talk to. I’ve had the opportunity to talk with executives at Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor, Springsoft, GateRocket, Oasys, Numetrics, and a dozen other EDA companies. I’ve even had the chance to interview some of them. And all the fellow bloggers I’ve met and now realize how much they know. On the flip side, I’ve been approached by PR people, both independent and in-house. I was interviewed 3 separate times, once by email by Rick Jamison, once by Skype by Liz Massingill, and once live by Dee McCrorey. EETimes added my blog as a Trusted Source. For those who say that social media brings people together, I can certainly vouch for that.

harry the ASIC guy

I’ve been asked by a fellow blogger to offer a prediction of the top trend in EDA in 2010 as a contribution to that blog. I have one in mind, but I think it would be interesting to hear from everyone else, since you all are a lot smarter than me.

So, what do you think will be the top trend in EDA in 2010?

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

I was contacted a few weeks ago by Synopsys’ PR agency to see if I’d be interested in covering an upcoming product announcement. I usually ignore these “opportunities” since the information provided is usually carefully wordsmithed marketing gobbledygook and not enough for me to really form an opinion. However, it turned out that this announcement was on a subject I know a little bit about, so I took them up on their offer.

The announcement was “embargoed“, that is, I was not to make it public until today. Embargoes are a vestige of the days when traditional journalism ruled the roost and when PR departments thought they could control the timing of their message. I don’t think embargoes benefit companies anymore since news is reported at light speed (literally) and people will write what they want when they want. Still, I consider it a sort of gentleman’s agreement so I’m not writing about it until today.

I also waited a little bit until the “mainstream press” wrote their articles. That let’s me point you to the best of them and conserve the space here for my own views, rather that regurgitating the press release and nuts and bolts.

(Update: Here is a very good description of the Synphony flow from Ron Wilson).

Today, Synopsys announced a new product called Synphony High Level Synthesis. You can read about this here. Basically, Synopsys is introducing a high level synthesis (aka behavioral synthesis) product that takes as its input Matlab M-Code and produces RTL Code, a cycle accurate C-model, and a testbench for simulation. Since I have not used the tool, I cannot comment on the capabilities or the quality of results or compare it to other tools on the market. However, I have had some past experience with tools like Matlab (specifically SPW) and Synphony (specifically Behavioral Compiler). So, here are my thoughts, observations, opinions that come to mind.

1. Synopsys, once the leader in behavioral synthesis, is now the follower - When Synopsys introduced Behavioral Compiler over a decade ago they were the first to preach the gospel of high-level synthesis and all the associated benefits. Architectural optimization. Faster simulation. Bridging the gap between system design and ASIC design. Smaller and easier to understand code. Dogs and cats living together. The promises never fully materialized and Synopsys seemingly moved out of the market. Meanwhile, Mentor introduced Catapult C, Cadence introduced C-to-Silicon, and several others including Forte, Agility, Bluespec, Synfora, ChipVision, and AutoESL introduced their own high-level synthesis tools. Now, after acquiring Synplify DSP through Synplicity, Synopsys is finally re-entering the market (at least for ASIC design) with Synphony. The hunted have become the hunters.
2. Synphony takes M-code from Matlab as its only source - Whereas most (but not all) other high-level synthesis tools input C like languages, Synopsys has chosen to input M-code only, at least for now. According to Chris Eddington, who is Director of Product Marketing for System-Level Products at Synopsys (according to his LinkedIn profile), approximately 60% of those who say they do “high-level design” are using M-code or some form of C (ANSI C, C++, System-C) for some portion of their design activities. Of those, slightly more use the C variants than M-code, which means that somewhere close to 25% of all ASIC designers could be a possible market for this tool.
3. Synopsys can try to leverage the Matlab installed base - As mentioned above, Synopsys estimates that 25% of high-level designers could use the Synphony tool which is a pretty big market. By targeting mainly algorithmic design, not control logic, Synopsys can try to serve the Matlab installed base with a more narrowly targeted offering which should make it easier to support. It also allows Synopsys to avoid a bloody battle over C dominance and to pursue a blue ocean strategy with Matlab’s installed base. Interestingly though, there is no partnership with MathWorks implied by this announcement.
4. Synphony leverages existing IP libraries - Libraries already exist for many common functions that were available for the Synplify DSP tool. The library elements are available as well for Synphony, allowing the designer to specify his functionality using this library or using M-code as the source.
5. An FPGA tool is being adapted for ASIC - This is probably one of the first times that a tool initially developed for FPGAs (Synplify DSP) is being adapted for ASICs. It’s usually the other way around (e.g. FPGA Compiler grew out of Design Compiler). It should be interesting to see if the FPGA tool can “cut-it” in the ASIC world.
6. Ties to implementation are seemingly tenuous - A tool that can take M-code as its input and produce RTL and C and do all the other things is all fine and good. But for Synphony to become more than an experimentation tool, it has to produce results (speed, area, power) as good or better than hand-coded RTL. However, the ties to the implementation tool (Design Compiler) are not as direct as even Behavioral Compiler was a decade ago. It seems that Synphony takes an approach where it pre-compiles and estimates timing for various blocks (kind of like building DesignWare libraries), but it assembles the design outside of DesignCompiler without all the associated timing views and engines necessary for true design and timing closure. It’s hard to understand how this can reliably produce results that consistently meet timing, but perhaps there is something that I am not aware of?
7. Focus on “algorithmic design”, not control - As mentioned above, Synopsys is going after the folks using Matlab. And those designers are developing algorithms, not state machines. In essence, Synphony can focus on the fairly straightforward problem of scheduling mathematical operations to hit throughput and latency goals and not deal with more complex control logic. Much simpler.
8. Conversion from Floating Point to Fixed Point - Anyone who has designed a filter or any DSP function knows that the devil is in the details, specifically the details of fixed point bit width. One choice of bit width affects downstream choices. You have to decide whether to round or truncate and these decisions can introduce unexpected artifacts into your signal. Synphony converts the floating point Matlab model into a fixed point implementation. Supposedly, it then allows you to easily fiddle with the bit widths to tweak the performance. Some earlier Synopsys products did this (Cossap, System Studio) and it’s a nice feature that can save time. We’ll see how useful it really is over time.
9. Synphony produces real RTL, as well as C-code and a testbench - One of the drawbacks of Behavioral Compiler is that it never produced a human readable form of RTL code. This made it hard to simulate and debug the RTL. Synphony supplies readable RTL (or so I am told) as well as cycle accurate C-code for system simulation and a testbench for block simulation. This should help facilitate full chip simulations for chip integration, since Synphony will probably only be used on blocks, not entire chips.
10. Couldn’t Synopsys come up with a better reference than Toyon Research Corporation - No offense to Toyon, but they are hardly a household name. It makes me wonder how many partners Synopsys has engaged in this development and how well tested this flow is. Not saying it isn’t well tested, just that Synopsys is making me wonder. Gimme a name I’ve heard of, please.

Only time will tell if Synphony is truly music to our ears, or if it is just SYNthesis that is PHONY.

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