commbasics

Corporate websites in the semiconductor industry provide the information that customers trust and go to, over the sites that identify themselves as “independent journalism.” As I wrapped up the old year, a trend I’ve been watching since 2000 finally came to a conclusion: Media as we have defined it for the past 50 years is dead in the semiconductor industry.  It has been replaced by Corporations as Media.  Some may think the beginning of this trend was when Paul Miller, then CEO of UBM Tech, announced to the EDAC member meeting that EE Times was dropping coverage of the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry.  It really began in 2000 when the three large EDA companies — Synopsys , Mentor Graphics and Cadence — began slashing their advertising budgets with the express design to reduce the number of print pages in the robust media industry.  The plan was to limit the amount of “free PR” smaller companies were getting thanks to the advertising dollars from t...

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...