EDA Tech Forum

Gary Smith looks at the evolution of EDA’s largest event and the challenges it now faces

When I left the semiconductor industry to become an EDA Analyst, I was struck by two things. The first was the professionalism of the PR firms handling the EDA accounts. They not only did jobs that would be expected of them by silicon vendors, but also performed functions that we would consider part of a semiconductor marketing team’s job. That moved them from being a necessary evil to a major marketing asset. And then there was the Design Automation Conference (DAC).

As a semiconductor executive, I would have given my right arm for something like DAC. We had a hodgepodge of regional shows that sucked up time and resources, and provided an often-questionable return on investment. By the way, in those days, regional meant Chicago, Denver, Boston, Atlanta, and Dallas – not the more romantic trips to Paris, London, Tokyo and Hong Kong. DAC, on the other hand, had become the lynchpin of the design world. It was Christmas and New Year all rolled into one. Your Yuletide presents were the new EDA tools needed to solve the problems generated by Moore’s Law’s merciless march. That was followed by the parties, DAC as Hogmanay, announcing the beginning of another design year. Everyone was there: the designers, the CAD managers, and, of course, the EDA vendors. Indeed, unless you were a very early stage start-up and did not have a booth at DAC, ‘no party’ was tantamount to saying that you were going out of business. It was an EDA marketing manager’s dream. Not only that but it set the pulse of the EDA Industry.