DAC'14 Troublemakers Panel in San Francisco, CA
Cooley: "Now that Cadence PVS works at comprable speeds to
Mentor Calibre, do you see DRC marketshare moving
to Cadence?"
Sawicki: "So, I won't even bother arguing with the first part of
that question. Once again I think competition is a
wonderful thing. It's how we all get better tools.
Going after the dominant tool in the market is not
an easy task -- unless that tool messes up. I got
some experience here. Calibre did really well against
Cadence Dracula by bringing new technology to bear."
"I gotta thank one of the previous, previous, previous
regimes at CDNS for messing up really badly with
Dracula during that transition when we brought Calibre
into the market. Our plan is to not mess up. We're
highly paranoid people that are very aggressive with
our developement investment in the DRC/LVS space.
Worried? I'm always worried. It's a hobby."
Cooley: "But what about MENT rivals marrying their early DRC
tools into their PNR tools like SNPS IC Validator
inside IC Compiler or Cadence iPVS inside EDI?"
Sawicki: "So are we. We're doing it with Calibre InRoute inside
Oympus-SoC. And I think our Calibre integration into
ICC or EDI is as good as any native SNPS/CDNS DRC tool."
Cooley: "But couldn't that hurt your future Calibre sales?"
Sawicki: "It's been going on for 3 years. No effect to date."
[ awkward pause ]
Anirudh: "Well I have to comment on this one..." [audience laughs]
Sawicki: "Color me surprised..." [audience laughs]
Anirudh: "I don't agree with the premise that the DRC tool has to
mess up. The market itself can change. For example, TI
didn't mess up in the hand held calculator business;
the market changed on them."
"The DRC market is going to change. DRC is going to get
much more integrated inside the PNR flow. And that
presents opportunities apart from the core DRC function
that customers want to see."
"And talking about Cadence iPVS integration with Cadence
Virtuoso and Cadence Encounter; our iPVS business is
growning dramatically in the past 2 to 3 years."
Sawicki: "You can't find that in the CDNS financials, though..."
Anirudh: "What people don't realize is that even before I joined
Cadence, they were at $800 M to $900 M a few years ago,
and we're now at $1.6 billion. A lot of things have
grown in CDNS that people don't realize, and they have a
perception of CDNS from 5 years ago..."
Cooley: "But to be fair, though, also MENT grew too because there
is this guy named Carl Icahn who decided to rattle the
cage there and suddenly everything changed."
Speaking of which, how's Carl doing?"
Sawicki: "You know I'm really pissed off at Carl. The last couple
of internal calls to about our Calibre releases, he has
not made the call -- so I have no guidance on whether
or not we should change the AND functionally in the
Calibre tool. You know, I expect a certain level of
commitment from our investors." [audience laughs]
Cooley: "Is Carl going to pull out of MENT?"
Sawicki: "I doubt it. For the last 5 years you look at EDA, SNPS
has done 2X, CDNS has done 3X, and MENT has done 4X for
the last 5 years. In general investors are seeing EDA
as a good space right now. We're not trading at absurd
multiples. There a solid business model to be had there.
We're doing fairly well. I don't think Carl is on his
way out the door because I think he sees this as a good
investment and we don't have drama."
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