( ESNUG 579 Item 2 ) ---------------------------------------------- [12/14/17]
Subject: Synopsys layoffs means ICC2 rewrite is unknown for 3 to 4 years out
DAC'17 Troublemakers Panel in Austin, TX
Cooley: Anirudh, with the IC Compiler II disaster and Antun Domic being
"promoted" to CTO, do you think Aart De Geus regrets laying
you off 5 years ago? [laughter]
Anirudh: I don't know how to begin answering that question. First, just
to be clear, I was at Magma, as most of you know, and the only
company I joined after Magma was Cadence, and Lip-Bu contacted
me. So, I want to say that for the record, I was never at the
other company.
Cooley: So, you weren't even invited into Synopsys is what you're
saying. [laughter]
Anirudh: I already said my position on that, and I think in retrospect
that's a great decision that I made.
Cooley: Yeah. So actually, on the more relevant side, what do think
of Aart putting Sassine Ghazi, his prior VP of North American
Sales, to be your rival now, to manage digital R&D?
Anirudh: I think we are very fortunate that we are leading the
implementation market. When I talk to customers they want
us to focus on improving technology, and improving the PnR
product. We have a fabulous team and I think...
Cooley: [being snarky] So by "we" meaning you and Sassine together?
Anirudh: "We" meaning Cadence. I'm not going to comment on individual
people in the other company. But I think in terms of Cadence,
we have a very strong team. Actually, I've been lucky to be
in some very strong places, whether it was IBM research, CMU,
or other places. And I think we at Cadence have assembled of
the one of the strongest teams in EDA, and we have to focus
on delivering value to our customers.
Cooley: But Aart just did a "reset" on his R&D staff and that can be
threatening to you.
Anirudh: Well I mean that's not how we operate. I think we have to
focus on what we can do, and to me it's not just what we have,
it's how we can improve the tool. So, we always want to get
to optimal solutions, and that's what we're driving and we
have strong roadmap. At this point, we just have to drive
from the front and see how things go.
Cooley: Okay. Joe what do you think of it?
Sawicki: Well you made the comment about Antun. I ran into Antun.
He seems awfully happy for someone who...
Cooley: Well, a lot of work and a lot of stress is off his shoulders.
Sawicki: I was under the impression Aart actually had two-in-a-box
over there, in terms of that SNPS R&D group.
Cooley: My understanding is Sassine is doing the R&D side and
Deirdre is doing the support side.
Sawicki: I couldn't tell you. Synopsys is not a badly run company.
Cooley: Jim?
Hogan: I'll say this. There's a beginning and an end to everybody's
career. There's times when your career flourishes, everything's
great, and everything's going your way. But that's when you
don't have any competition.
So, when competition is introduced, suddenly it's a different
ballgame. If you haven't had competition for quite a while you
don't remember how to fight.
So Antun, God bless him, he's a colleague of mine, a peer, a
friend. He had a very challenging situation where he tried to
basically change the engine of his PnR airplane in flight.
That's never easy.
Then you got this really smart, young guy [points to Anirudh]
that comes in with great ideas and executes really well.
And they [Synopsys] had a mishap in the PnR engine exchange.
It's interesting. I don't know what the exact numbers are, but
Synopsys laid off 200 people between 55-60 years old. So, they
cleaned house of everybody in the prior generation.
So, how long does it take that new IC Compiler II generation to
get on their feet and start being productive and potentially
challenge Anirudh for the lead?
In my experience, writing a place and route system takes 3 to 4
years. We're not going to know if Synopsys has a good team or
not for 3 or 4 years.
Cooley: Anirudh?
Anirudh: I think I'm very confident in our position. And I'm very
confident in our team, because a lot of it we built a few years
ago. They're working very well. And also, we have a lot of
collaboration within Cadence. This is the culture that Lip-Bu
has driven in Cadence.
We talk about P&R a lot and that's important. But as I've said
before, at lower nodes, you have to integrate other parts of the
flow. Sign-off -- power sign-off or timing sign-off -- has to
be integrated. Synthesis must be integrated, so we have a
fully integrated PnR flow that we built from day one.
We have a fully parallel and distributed flow, and then we are
looking at new things like machine learning to improve PPA.
So, we need to keep improving our tools, and I'm very confident
in the R&D team we have at Cadence. And the partners. And the
customers that are working with us because they also drive us
in a lot of ways.
Overall, I'm very happy, and very fortunate to be in this
position.
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