( ESNUG 450 Item 1 ) --------------------------------------------- [01/25/06]
Subject: ReShape's Farewell Letter; Tera Systems Weirdly Silent these Days
> You can set your number of Tera System and ReShape readers to zero in your
> count. I hear both companies have shut down in the last two weeks.
>
> - [ An Anon EDA Vendor ]
From: Jim Douglas <jd=usr domain=reshape hot mom>
Hi, John,
I'd like to give you a brief update on what's going on at ReShape. We've
reached a point where additional capital is necessary to build a direct
sales channel. The company had the option of raising another round of
venture funding or selling the technology. The board decided on the later
and we are actively pursuing that option.
My history with the company began a little over 2 years ago. I joined
ReShape to help them commercialize their proprietary EDA tools and to
transition their business model from services to software. The initial
product offering was an integrated design environment featuring a powerful
floorplanning tool (PD Optimizer) and an advanced PD flow automation
environment (PD Builder). The target customer for this solution was
designing large, hierarchical SoCs.
By using our abutted hierarchical design methodology, in benchmarks we
could reliably deliver in 2 weeks a new floorplan with 10-20% die size
reduction, a full chip build (including all blocks in the hierarchy), and
initial top-level timing. The customers consistently reacted with:
"I can't believe you were able to reduce our floorplan that much and
make as much progress on the design as you did in just two weeks."
and
"We had an incredibly difficult time achieving design closure on that
netlist. We won't believe you can close the design without using
channels and logic at the top and produce the results you are showing
unless we see it in silicon."
This skepticism led to a long, expensive, and prohibitive sales cycle.
Although our existing customers were getting great results, it had become
obvious scaling ReShape with this product offering would be difficult and
expensive. We had yet to find the formula for a successful business.
Nearly every customer we had engaged who were designing hierarchical chips
said their leading headaches were design closure without significant "guard
banding" and/or badly missed tapeout schedules. So we decided to re-focus
our efforts on this problem and developed a new PD optimization tool called
Vortex. The tool harvests inefficient and unused resources to concurrently
optimize the top-level of a hierarchical design for timing, congestion, and
SI simultaneously. Vortex evaluates and manipulates (adjusts, adds,
subtracts) pins, repeaters, wires, and feed-throughs to produce an optimized
design that will rapidly meet specs for tape out. This is predominately done
manually by design engineers today and can lead to significant delays in
schedule and/or inferior silicon results. An alpha version of Vortex was
shown in public for the first time at DAC 2005. Based on the excitement
at DAC, we were able to line up more than a dozen beta test partnerships with
customers in North America, Europe, and Japan during Q4 of 2005. Full
production and initial sales of Vortex were slated for Q1 2006. The results
achieved in the beta tests were exceptional across the board. It routinely
blew away the targets established by customers prior to its evaluation.
As I stated up front, bringing Vortex to market "the right way" requires
additional capital. With the amount of funding ReShape has raised to date,
it makes more sense to partner with a more established vendor to than to go
it alone moving forward.
Working with the development and application engineering teams at ReShape
has truly been one of the highlights of my career.
- Jim Douglas, CEO
ReShape, Inc. San Jose, CA
Editor's Note: I'm bummed ReShape is shutting down due to money issues.
I've known many of their team for years and they were working not on
"nice to have" tools but on true design-pain-reducing PD tools. - John
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: [ An Another Anon EDA Vendor ]
Hi, John,
FYI -- Tera Systems is End-of-Life.
- [ An Another Anon EDA Vendor ]
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: Frank Lorenzo <florenzo=usr domain=realintent hot mom>
Hi John,
What do you know of the status of Tera Systems? I worked there a few years
and I stupidly bought $17,000 of the Pre-IPO stock when I left. I heard
they closed their doors. Am I correct in assuming I now own expensive
toilet paper?
- Frank Lorenzo
Real Intent, Inc. Morganville, NJ
Editor's Note: Although 3 people have told me Tera Systems is dead, no one
from the company has said so. Last week and this week, I tried multiple
times to reach Tera's management, but they don't call or email back nor
does any human answer their phones now. So they're maybe dead, MIA for
sure. I suspect your investment is expensive wall paper, Frank. - John
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