[ Editor's Note:  I'm not going to try to explain the crazy politics
   that got this particular Industry Gadfly column yanked from EE Times.
   All I can say is: "Thank God For An Uncensored Internet".  - John ]


    !!!     "It's not a BUG,                        jcooley@world.std.com
   /o o\  /  it's a FEATURE!"                              (508) 429-4357
  (  >  )
   \ - /        INDUSTRY GADFLY: "Thank God for Gerry Hsu"
   _] [_
                   by John Cooley, EE Times Columnist

      Holliston Poor Farm, P.O. Box 6222, Holliston, MA  01746-6222

OK, I haven't lost it.  I know how Gerry Hsu, the CEO of Avanti, is seen as
the O.J. Simpson of the EDA world with his criminal court case continually
playing in the Press.  And a lot of people think he's guilty as sin.  But
I think he's being mis-characterized here.  Gerry's no O.J. by any means.
Gerry's more like the Josef Stalin of the EDA world.

Stalin ruled Russia with a cult of personality the same way Gerry rules
Avanti.  Stalin was extremely paranoid, but he was dealing with Hitler and
very unforgiving Russian politics.  Gerry's paranoid, but he's dealing with
Cadence and a very unforgiving San Jose District Attorney's Office.  Stalin
killed millions of people in the Soviet Union, sort of like how Gerry burns
through employees at Avanti.

But Stalin took a backwards Russia and in 30 years made it a nuclear world
Soviet super power that bested the German Wehrmacht along the way.  Gerry
took a nothing ArcSys and turned it into a 26 consecutive profitable
quarters Avanti that still bests Cadence in most P&R benchmarks.

Let me say that last thought another way.  Since its start, LSI Logic has
always been a "homebrew" P&R tools company (i.e. LSI PD and LSI CMDE.)  Yet,
recently LSI Logic fired their internal backend tool developers and
standardized on Avanti's timing-driven P&R toolset.  Why?  Not because
of Gerry's charming persona.  Hardly.  It was because Gerry's tools kicked
butt in the benchmarks.  (This is also why Intel was Avanti's biggest
customer last year, followed by TI, Lucent, Philips, AMD, and Infineon.)

You could say Gerry bought this win when he bought Compass' timing-driven
FixTime placer, but I'd disagree.  I had a contract four years ago where my
client used FixTime.  It was crap.  It's only when Gerry's R&D team in
Fremont reworked FixTime two years ago is when timing-driven placement
became real for customers in the form of the Avanti Saturn/Apollo II tools.

Gerry was also the first big P&R vendor to incorporate serious OPC when he
took TMA's Proteus and made it his Taurus OPC.  The ISS/ArcSys merger made
his Hercules.  And Mentor just now is talking OPC with its Calbre toolset.

On the dark side, customers are still furious about Gerry's $47K price on
interHDL's VeriLint.  And if you're not Chinese, you might as well forget
about being part of the inner circle at Avanti.  And again, the lawsuit.

So, when Penny Herscher, the CEO of Simplex, said at DAC'99 that "Jail's too
good for Gerry Hsu", I knew she said that as an EDA *developer*.  But as an
EDA *user*, I say: "Thank God for Gerry Hsu.  He's the first one who brought
to customers *real* competition and options in the backend P&R flow."

-----

    John Cooley runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG), is a
    contract ASIC designer, and loves hearing from engineers at
    "jcooley@world.std.com" or (508) 429-4357.