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

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

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 may be the engineer in the family, but my wife is the inventor.

Being an engineer is easy. You go to school to learn well established laws and methods. When you get a job, there are others who can mentor you and show you the ropes. If you need to know more, there are training classes to take. Someone else, usually marketing, decides what needs to be to be designed. All you have to do is follow the rules.

Being an inventor is hard. There is no school for inventing, nobody to teach you the ropes, and no classes to tell you how to do things. You come up with your own idea that has never been done before. You learn on the fly what you need to know from a variety of domains you know nothing about. You build it yourself. There is no such thing as first pass success. Experimentation and refinement are a constant process.

For those of you who know Joyce and have been privileged to receive one of her hand-made personalized holiday “greetings”, you know that she is one of the most creative and gifted people you could ever meet. I’ve had people tell me that they look forward to the holidays just to find out what she is going to send. Most Novembers, our garage looks like a scene out of Honey I Shrunk The Kids as Joyce invents a new holiday greeting. Each of these inventions takes countless hours of brainstorming, planning, experimenting, assembling, and tweaking to get it “just right”.

There was the mobile of our kids made with clear fishing line tied off. The fishing line, being so slick, would always untie until Joyce figured out to add a drop of glue to the end to keep it in place. Problem solved.

A few years ago Joyce made a lantern with pictures of our children on the outside. It took a lot of research and experimentation to make sure the cardboard comprising the lantern was sufficiently coated so as not to catch fire but still provide a cozy glow. Good to go.

And probably the most interesting of all, there was the snow globe which contained an acrylic encased photo of our daughter Kiara reaching for the stars. I remember Joyce’s frustration trying to pry the small Lucite blocks from their molds until she realized that sticking them in cold water would loosen the blocks from the molds due to the CTE mismatch between the materials. Then, these Lucite blocks were placed in baby food jars that had to have just the right mixture of water and propylene glycol to be viscous and not grow algae. Perfect.

About a year and a half ago, we were visiting Legoland in Carlsbad, CA. My kids (then 4 and 6), especially my son, have a gift for getting “sidetracked”. So, Joyce thought it would be a good idea for our kids to have our cell phone numbers conspicuously on them in case they got lost. That way, it would not depend on their memory of our cell numbers for us to be contacted by a helpful stranger if they wandered away. That’s when the idea for the “WhoTat” was born.

Joyce decided to start a business called Aware Gear that would provide safety products for young children. The first product was the WhoTat which is a temporary tattoo that is personalized with a phone number to call in case of emergency. Kids like to wear them and parents know that their kids don’t need to remember their phone numbers. Now, I’ll admit that I was personally dubious that this was needed. After all, how hard is it for a kid to remember a phone number? The problem is that most of us have several phone numbers (home, work, cell) and a scared lost child of any age can get confused and even mix the phone numbers together. That’s what my son did, mix the numbers together.

As with the other holiday greetings, this was an invention of its own. At first it seemed easy. Just buy these tattoo sheets that could be fed into a printer, design some neat tattoos, add the phone number, and print. But it wasn’t so easy. First there were moisture issues where the printing process wouldn’t work on humid days or the ink wouldn’t stick. Then the Tats were kind of sticky, so baby powder was used to remove the stickiness, but not too much so as to blur the image. It was probably 6 months before she got the process down to something that would repeatably produce a high quality product.

The second offering was a skin sticker where you could write in your own phone number or message on the fly. Again, material problems. Most recently, she is producing glow-in-the-dark skin stickers called gid-its. With Halloween coming up, and all the inherent dangers of visiting strangers while trick-or-treating, this should help kids stay safe. Once again, this has proven to be a real lesson in materials science, specifically how to get paint with glow-in-the-dark powder to adhere evenly to a non- porous acrylic surface. Who knew? Oh, and 2 days ago she told me about another invention idea and I already see the beginnings of prototypes around the house.

Since Halloween is coming around and child safety is a big concern for a lot of parents, I’d like to ask a favor … ummm … I mean offer you an opportunity. Actually, 3 opportunities.

First, as I mentioned, my wife is a creative genius and you have the opportunity to acquire some of there original work. Her products really do help to keep kids safe and are fun and you have the opportunity to get them for your kids. If you don’t have young kids, tell a friend who does. You can order them here. An if you use the checkout code ASICGUY10 you will get a 10% discount.

Second, you have an opportunity to support a good organization. In addition to the 10% discount mentioned above, Joyce will donate 10% directly to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The NCMEC acts as an information clearinghouse and resource for parents, children, law enforcement agencies, schools, and communities to assist in locating missing children and to raise public awareness about ways to prevent child abduction, child sexual abuse and child pornography. John Walsh, Noreen Gosch, and others advocated establishing the center as a result of frustration stemming from a lack of resources and coordination between law enforcement and other government agencies.

Lastly, if you have gotten some value out of reading this blog over time, then here is your chance to thank me. I’d really appreciate it.

harry the ASIC guy