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51st Design Automation Conference (DAC) in San Francisco have come out and, if they are anything like past reports, the numbers are, in the least, moderately steamed if not entirely cooked. The latest numbers on the 51st Design Automation Conference (DAC) in San Francisco have come out and, if they are anything like past reports, the numbers are, in the least, moderately steamed if not entirely cooked.  I found a site that does independent audits of trade show attendance and found that the numbers reported by the Electronic Design Automation Consortium ( EDAC ) are between 50 and 1000 participants higher than the independent audit numbers. In reality, the EDA “official” total attendance of 6,701 attendees — if accurate — is slightly under the 6 year average of 6,795.  DAC is not growing.  It’s flat.  There is one definite trend that’s showing a decrease, and that is exhibitor support which has come down steadily from 3400 exhibitor support staff down to 2500 th...

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...

Just had a chance to listen to the EDAC panel on Social Media , and again IMHO, Brian Fuller captures my attention with a tidbit out of left field.  And even he didn't catch it. Brian threw up a slide showing where engineers get their information and again it beat the dead horse that the two top vote getters were company websites and colleagues.  Brian even tossed social media away as almost an anomaly. But buried in that information was a real nugget.  The numbers showed that corporate websites have actually dropped a percentage point year to year as a source of information for engineers.  Still number 1 but a slip.  Colleagues maintain the same percentage.  Print was down 20 percent, no big surprise there.  Trade shows are down 1 percent.  And social media scrapes the bottom of the barrel... at first glance. But look at the numbers year to year and then consider the growth rate.  If you combine blogs, RSS feeds and social medi...