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  It has been replaced by Corporations as Media.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...

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 ...

I just finished four days of audio podcast recording at the 2009 Design Automation Conference and, in accordance with my contrarian nature, I thought there were a lot of good things.  Let's look, first, at the numbers.  Officially, they are up, but they don't add up, and when you look at the show floor you know things were going south.  I talked to 10 companies, who didn't want to be quoted, who admitted that if thing don;t turn around in 6-9 months, they will not be back at DAC next year. And yet, in all of that there was hope.   Bob Gardner of the Electronic Design Automation Consortium talked to me briefly about the changes they will be making in promoting the show.  The details were sketchy but just the fact that they are looking at doing something different ... anything different ... is a move in the right direction.  The DAC committee worked hard to present some new and interesting "knowledge niches" in the conference (tha...