!!! "It's not a BUG, jcooley@TheWorld.com
/o o\ / it's a FEATURE!" (508) 429-4357
( > )
\ - / INDUSTRY GADFLY: "What was Vic Kulkarni thinking?"
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by John Cooley, EE Times Columnist
Holliston Poor Farm, P.O. Box 6222, Holliston, MA 01746-6222
I laughed when I heard the story. Patrick Wei, a newly hired Apache field
engineer, posed using false credentials to enter the Sequence DAC suite
for a demo. The Sequence guys discovered what Patrick had done when they
went spying on Apache's DAC booth and found him working there. Sequence was
furious, but, it was all in the good fun of the DAC tradition. I laughed.
That was until Patrick got fired. I was miffed about that. Spend a little
time around EDA folk and one of the first things you'll learn is that the
EDA world is very small and quite incestious. Even down at the R&D level,
everybody pretty much knows what everyone else is working on.
Nassda is mostly ex-Synopsys EPIC guys. Silicon Perspectices was mostly
ex-Cadence employees. Synplicity and Verplex swims with ex-Mentor guys.
Magma, AmmoCore, InTime, Atrenta, Novas, Simplex, CoWare are all a mix of
ex-Cadence and ex-Synopsys employees. Sequence is a mix of ex-Avanti,
ex-Sente, ex-Mentor, and ex-Cadence engineers.
"There's a limited number of EDA R&D guys and they move around like crazy,"
said Mike Santarini of EE Times. "DAC is like a homecoming for them.
They've all worked together at one time or another."
Those of us who have been around EDA for a while know that DAC really is
just a place is where EDA vendors make marketing pitches to see what sticks
with users. Vic Kulkarni, the CEO of Sequence (and an ex-Avanti Marketing
VP), knows the difference between a rival stealing his source code versus
his marketing message. So I got quite angry when I found out that Patrick
had been fired from Apache and then Vic involved him in a lawsuit anyway;
all this because Patrick snagged his Sequence sales pitch? That ain't
right, and it makes Sequence look paranoid and desperate. What was Vic
thinking when he initiated this frivous lawsuit?
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John Cooley runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG), is a
contract ASIC designer, and loves hearing from engineers at
"jcooley@TheWorld.com" or (508) 429-4357.
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