commbasics

If one company finally decides to go strategic, it will dominate not only their niche, but will be come the de facto thought leader. Publitek recently released its second annual report on “ Who’s winning the social media battle in the Semiconductor industry ,” with an expanded list of selected companies.  The good news is more companies are getting into the social media game with vigor.  Even better news is the amount of primary engagement (likes and follows) obliterates the belief that engineers don’t use social media with more than 30 million Facebook likes of posts in one month for the top five companies alone.  You could discount as much as half of that as bogus traffic from clip farms and even a significant number of corporate hacks boosting their numbers, but that means millions still are attributed to customers. The bad news of that last point is companies are still, by and large, ignoring that potential channel of conversation with the customer.  One comp...

Time for my annual review of spin metric from the Design Automation Conference (DAC), this year held in Austin, Texas for the first time.  Last year I called the conference attendance as flat.  I'm calling the same for this year. This was a controversial decision and caused many companies in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry to stay home from the exhibit.  But the final news release put on a big smile and said the event "exceeded expectations."  That it did.  Most everyone I talked to said it would be a "ghost town." "deader than a doornail" and other less than happy predictions.  It was not as bad as people thought.  It was not as good as some people say. It is unfair to compare Austin's effort to San Francisco's last year.  It's better to compare it the San Diego the year previous because of the similarities in logistics.  San Diego and Austin are a lot cheaper to put o...

Just got Gabe Moretti's email newsletter where he takes me to task for bagging on the EDA industry's lack of marketing acumen.  Always like to know when people disagree with me and Gabe makes some good points.  But there was one that popped out to me: "Lou repeats the old mantra that EDA companies area really not making the tools that the costumers want, and that should they ever get smart enough to just do that they would become widely profitable. There is nothing farther from the truth than this statement. I agree that EDA could benefit form an injection of capable marketing know how, may be even using social media. We do not need to discover what is needed to take a design to silicon: we have done that for over thirty years as an industry and longer than that as in-house CAD departments." To which I answer with an old adage, "If you guys are so smart, why ain't you rich?" I'm off to check out a profitable industry.  C ya. UPDATE:...

I didn’t go to the 2011 Design Automation Conference in San Diego because this year I decided to stay home and see what I could pick up virtually from video, audio and news coverage day to day.  It was much more cost effective and focused, despite the usual bandwidth problems with the convention center. My apologies for mixing metaphors but this is how I wrap up the issues arising out of DAC.  It is said that if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door, but when your customers are up to their asses in alligators, vermin are not their critical problem.  Gary Smith gave his usual glowing report of the future for the industry (he thinks it’s well on the way to being a $6.6 Billion industry by 2015, and once again he claims that this year Electronic system level design (ESL) is going to be really big this year (just like it has every year for the past decade, according to Gary.)  But this year he added a big caveat. He said that the indus...

Just got the latest newsletter from Gabe Moretti. He opens with an overview of #DAC and gives a pretty good critique of the weak attempt to bring attention to embedded software at the conference, but about midway through he blames the media's lack of attention to the industry on parochialism.  He specifically calls out United Business Media's scheduling of ESC Chicago at the same time as DAC. "Finally, has anyone noticed that ESC20 is taking place in Chicago during DAC?  Once again the EDA industry falls victim of parochialism, and the greed to make money at the expense of both users and vendors.  People at UBM certainly knew the DAC schedule.  So couldn't they schedule ESC20 around DAC?" Let's call a spade a spade here. #EDA doesn't get attention from the media because they make no effort to explain themselves or their reason for being.  The attitude that "a good product sells itself" is stupid marketing, especially...

Disturbing, though not surprising news out of the EDA industry this week.  I've stated a few weeks ago that Cadence has been going through another round of culling in the marketing departments and last week I learned that Synopsys , too, has been quietly downsizing marketing (why market when you're number one and your competitors aren't even trying).  Haven't heard a peep out of Mentor, but with Carl Icahn barking at their heels they have other problems... and Magma cuts it's marketing budget every year so that's nothing new. None of that is disturbing, though.  At a recent company meeting in Cadence fairly recently, the executive team did a panel presentation on where the company was heading.  My sources (confirmed twice) reported that after the presentation, one brave soul rose to ask someone to clarify the vision for the company (because it just wasn't clear in the presentation).  Charlie Huang, chief strategy officer took ...

Following up on my last post this morning , I needed to vent.  This is what I came up with. The kind of marketers available to the EDA world   Their reward for their efforts   EDA executives discussing what they really want in a marketing program after they have punished the marketing team and/or cut its budget. Where EDA executives go to look for marketing and PR to replace laid off marketing teams or fired agencies   The type of customer EDA executives are trying to reach  The type of customer that would respond positively to the message the executives come up with  How EDA executives view the power of the messages How EDA customer view the messages EDA executives produce I feel better now

In the past two posts I've shown that the consumer electronic industry, with few notable exceptions, has consistently failed to address and meet the need of the buying public ; that the semiconductor industry that follows that lead has delivered suspect information regarding market demand; and that the support industries to the semi industry has no solid idea what their value is to their customer, much less express that value to them.  How have we got to to this place? First off, we have a leadership in place; and a generation of engineers in marketing that were trained by that leadership, whose frame of reference rests in the 1980s markets -- back when electronics was still in the entrepreneurial phase of its life.  In the 1980s, Lockheed Missiles and Space Division was still putting together technical documents with pen, ink and typewriters.  Semiconductor-based products were just the province or technology early adopters (nerds) and were considered generally be...

So yesterday I talked about the failure of the semiconductor industry, as a whole, to accurately anticipate much of the market need.  I identified the causes of that failure as an inadequate funding of the marketing effort as well as a pervasive preference to withhold accurate data from industry analysis that is relied upon to develop new products.  How deep does this go?  I’m going to use the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Industry as an example.  They support the semi industry with the tools they need to design and analyze complex products. At the Electronic Design Automation Consortium (EDAC) industry forecast meeting this month it was pointed out that while semiconductor revenues have increased by double digits in 2010 while EDA is still in single digits (although it had decreased the previous two years).   Aart DeGeus, CEO of Synopsys, repeated an observation he has had many times in the past that EDA is not “getting its fair share” of the value i...

What do these things have in common? CES AMD board firing the CEO EDAC Annual Forecast meeting Articles about engineers not liking Twitter Give up? It’s all evidence that engineers need to be removed from corporate management in the semiconductors space... that includes electronic design automation (EDA) and test. The nation is either coming out of the recession or is on the cusp of a second recessionary dip.  Revenues in semi are up, Revenues in capital equipment are up, revenues in design automation are up. everyone should be breathing a sigh of relief, but there are ominous clouds on the horizon.  There was all the hoopla at CES about tablets and 4G wireless but the real undercurrent was there was no real innovation.   Not only was there little innovation on display but there were few product that anyone would actually want.  A widely reported study from Accenture showed that 95 percent of the products that were announced at CES would be returned with no def...

You may have noticed that I have not been talking about marketing and media in EDA and semiconductors for a few months and I've been struggling with how to talk about it for some time.  It's finally reach a head, though, so I might as well say it. Innovation in the semiconductor sector is so rare now that it virtually does not exist.  That may be why no one in the semiconductor industry, outside of the giants, does any marketing.  But then, if you don't do marketing you won't know what needs to be innovated.  Vicious circle, that. I've had a love/hate relationship with EDA and semis for a long time.  I've always thought they were incredibly important sectors and a source of great innovation.  I've worked with some of the most innovative and groundbreaking companies in both sectors and I always hoped to be a part of it.  But in the past few months I've come to understand what the VCs, entrepreneurs, government agen...

At the Design Automation Conference a couple of weeks ago, one of the big topics of discussion was the use of "Cloud Computing" and one the up-and-coming player in that field is Xuropa.  I did one of my live video interviews with James Colgan, Xuropa's founder an CEO, regarding how that is affecting the bottom line for the industry.  The real kicker came at the end of the interview where James talked about the hard evidence of benefit for the concept... and that got truncated when the bandwidth gods shut down the broadcast.  So here's what I got and after you watch it, I'll tell you tomorrow what the bottom line was. Watch video live on Vpype Live Broadcaster

"I love it when a plan comes together"   John "Hannibal" Smith. Late last year, I started advising Magma Design on the use of social media and it they have been approaching it deliberately and with purpose.  They don't want to follow what everyone else does and they want to make sure it does them some good.  My first piece of advice in social media strategy is "get a vision for what you really want to do."  They are and I'm proud of their efforts so far. Today, however, they did something REALLY good. May 27, John Cooley's ESNUG published a review by a user on Magma's Quartz product that claimed the product missed some substantial errors in an SoC design.  On June 2, the user wrote to John that found out he had been wrong in his results and that Quartz had not missed any errors nor had it produce false errors and he asked for a correction especially in light of the coming Design Automation Conference.  He didn't want to damage Magma...

The hot news today is that the EE Times Group of United Business Media (UBM) has purchased the DesignCon conference for a bargain price of $1.4 million.  Yikes.   I've always enjoyed DesignCon because it's technical content is just outstanding and very diverse... and I know I'm not alone in that belief.  Most editors I talk to prefer going to DesignCon than DAC for that reason.  (That's not to say DAC doesn't have good content so put your pitchforks down.)  The big difference between the two conferences is that the former is targeted toward what is going on inside the industry and the latter to what is going on in academia.  Plus dealing with the constantly moving circus that is DAC compared to the consistent location of the Santa Clara Convention Center makes planning and costs a lot easier to control. But I've also felt that DesignCon's marketing has been about at par with what DAC has always done and as a result, the emphasis never changes: DesignCon is...

Like any tech niche, social media is filled with buzz words, few of which are adequately defined.  Like "transparent."  All the consultants say you need to be transparent, which is supposed to be a synonym for truth.  But as Pilate asked, "What is truth?"   Then this week, was a flood of revelational posts.   Robert Scoble talked about the death of start-up launches in the context of the uselessness of start-up events, like Demo where they charge you $18K to participate and strictly control the flow of information... and how a good launch should be done.   Harry Gries  did a piece on how important it is for a start-up to focus on why they exist, not what they make.  And finally, the redoubtable David Scott Meerman  chimed in with a piece on solving a problem rather than discussing a product, essentially confirming Harry's two bits. In all of this information, I was having live conversations with technologists...

I did a boatload of podcast interviews with EDA companies at DAC in July and on my last day I got together with Dylan McGrath and Nic Mokhoff of EE Times regarding the issue of how the industry is communicating with its customer base. I think it’s interesting to note that while Dylan kinda agrees with me that he doesn’t see the evidence that engineers get all the information they need by talking to each other amd getting it off press releases, Nic generally agrees that engineers can get all the information they need off the web now, and will be able to do it even better in the future. What that means for traditional media, they aren’t sure. Note: The sound level on this is a bit wonky because my computer was trying to balance my big mouth with Nic’s soft basso. You’ll probably have to turn up the sound to hear Nic.

Something happened this week that brought up the issue of transparency, journalistic independence and why both are needed for a vibrant media that properly serves the industry.  As many of you know, I was asked to start a blog on EDA Cafe back in June and started a series of podcasts focusing on the bottom line of design automation.  in other words, finding out the industry could justify its existence financially to its customers.   We started out with a couple of interviews with the CEOs of Magma and Tanner EDA and then of the Real Intent CEO.  The first two readily admitted that figuring out the real ROI of EDA tools is something that has not been done well and needs to be done better.  The third interview had the same revelation, but you might notice that the interview is no longer available on EDA Cafe.  Real Intent lodged a complaint to EDA Cafe regarding the statement in the interview from the CEO that they could not accurately estimate the ...

Couple days ago I asked for some help in figuring out the DAC numbers and one of my readers let me to an article by Kevin Morris at the FPGA Journal about the same thing, but getting into the discrepancies with much more depth.  Answered all of my questions (thanks Kevin) and like I thought, it took an engineer. But far into the article, Kevin said something very insightful: " EDA has ignored the majority of electronic designers in the world - who are not doing ASIC/SoC design. Probably 95% or more of the people designing electronic systems in the world today are not designing ASICs, but are instead using FPGAs and commodity processors on custom circuit boards. With a few exceptions - EDA has not invested heavily in serving this 95%, but has instead put the bulk of their development resources into supporting the high-flying 5% doing nanometer IC design." He was making the point that if trade shows and conferences like DAC, DVCon, DATE, etc. are going to survive they hav...

OK, just so everyone knows, I thought DAC this year was pretty good.  I met a lot of interesting people and got a pretty good handle on the state of the EDA industry (really bad but with several bright spots and hope for the future. Then the number started coming out.  I'm not a math whiz.  In fact, I suffered math anxiety all through school, so this stuff makes my head hurt, and I need the help of all you engineering types out there to help me figure this out. The preliminary numbers for DAC 2009 were 5135 The final numbers reported for DAC 2008 were 4828 The preliminary numbers for DAC 2007 were "over 5100" (no definitive number was reported that I could find). The news release from DAC July 29 said DAC 2009 was up 12 percent from 2008 and 3 percent from 2007. So you engineers, correct me if I'm wrong.  For 2009 to be 3 percent higher than 2007, either 2007's "5100" has to be below 5100, right?  3 percent of 5100 is approxi...

Real interesting first day at DAC.  Free Monday seemed to bring people out of the woodwork in the morning  and traffic seemed to die out after lunch, but it wasn't for lack of trying on the DAC committee's part.  The DAC Pavilion was generally filled whenever I wandered by and the organization is trying mightily to deal with the issue of what to call bloggers.  Essentially the philosophy is a work in progress but there are some cutbacks.  John Cooley was "upset" that there was no food in the press room, but other than Paul Dempsey and John Donovan it looked like we could all cut back on the pastries. I could have had a full access pass if I asked for one, but I only needed to get interview rooms so I saw no need... even though the bag would have matched my orange tie as Georgian Marzsalek pointed out.  Some members of the press were upset that the default access was exhibits only, but as I have said, we all have to be flexible in the...