( DAC 99 Item 2 ) ----------------------------------------------- [6/25/99]

 The Numbers
 -----------

 This year's DAC had a 30 percent drop in attendance.   DAC'98 in San
 Francisco had 21,800, DAC'99 in New Orleans had 15,000.  In a nutshell,
 DAC is an EDA shopping trip and this year none of the cashless students
 came (because it cost too much) yet most of the serious sellers and buyers
 still came.  ( Student/University numbers -- mostly attendees signing up
 for Free Monday was 6,000.  This year it was 1,600 -- the same as the last
 time DAC was in Las Vegas.  Also, the number of exhibitor badges was down
 significantly -- 6,700 this year compared to 8,000 in San Francisco.)

 As a buyer, DAC'99 was a *better* place to do some serious comparision EDA
 shopping.  Those reduced crowds made it easier in those 4 short days to
 quickly sort out what was 'hot', what was not, and you had a few thousand
 other serious fellow buyers around to compare informal notes with.  ( Try
 doing that same amount of EDA shopping at home and it's wasted man-months
 in meetings and a momba line of glad-handing, smiling, sleazy EDA
 salesdroids parading through your company's conference rooms.  Ugh.)

 As a EDA seller, this year's DAC was either GREAT or it sucked big time;
 all depending of if you had a 'hot' tool or not.

    "The amount of money spent by the EDA companies to prepare for and
     staff the show was outrageous.  The customers would have been much
     better off if all the vendors had merely written $1K checks to each
     customer who attended and said, "have a good time on us."  It would
     have been much cheaper and the savings could have been used to 
     provide better tools and support."

         - from an EDA vendor who didn't have a 'hot' tool.


    "One aspect I liked this year was less people crowding out the booths.
     I work at a medium sized company that buys a few licences so I usually
     don't get as much attention as I see those Intel and SGI badges get.
     This year I didn't have to fight for demo time like I did last year."

         - from an EDA buyer


    "What's Not So Hot: Aspec  

     Hate to say it but these guys are the most unenthusiastic bunch of
     people.  But I guess you can't blame them.  They are trying to sell
     libraries which no one cares about these days."

         - an anon engineer