( DVcon 04 Item 1 ) ---------------------------------------------- [ 05/26/04 ]
Subject: the Bigwig's Big Speech
A HIT AND A MISS If you go back and look at the DVcon CEO Panel transcripts
in ESNUG 424 #2, you'll see that the CEO of Cadence, Ray Bingham, did quite
well against me and his rival CEOs in the debate. Ray stood up to all my
edgy questions plus he surprisingly did well against the Rajeev Madhavan, CEO
of Magma, attacks. Ray's "handlers" prepared him well.
On the flip side, Ray's handlers totally messed up his keynote address at
DVcon. Ray did a big no-no here. Instead of talking about an open industry
issue in this open industry conference, Ray gave a short Cadence verification
product pitch followed by no Q&A. This is like trying to build your own
house in a public park -- people are going to be hostile!
Ray's key point was that the verification space is a mess today, with
too many tools, languages, and methodologies. Therefore a platform
that brought together all these diverse approaches is necessary...
Hence platform is king, and Cadence will have to work with whatever is
out there. In other words, a plug for his Incisive platform.
- Ambar Sarkar of Paradigm Works
It was funny to see Ray squirm about Cadences a little too little a
little too late support of System Verilog. I think he is trying to
make Cadence the No. 4 EDA Company. I should have sold my remaining
Cadence stock in January.
- James Lee of the ASIC Group
Ray's speech did not give me much confidence in Cadence's ability to
compete with Synopsys or Mentor in the future. My initial thought was
that if I had owned Cadence stock I would have sold it immediately.
It seems like the world is going to System Verilog and Cadence will
totally miss the boat. I don't agree that his platform approach is
the way to go. In my experience, these platforms don't stand the test
of time. Several years from now when I need to roll my design, the
tools won't be available and I would have been better off with vi and
any old Verilog simulator.
I was spoiled by Aart de Geus' keynote at DesignCon, and was hoping
Ray would be as interesting. I was disappointed.
- Greg Schmidt of General Dynamics
I don't remember Ray saying much technically. He mostly was referring
to business and financial strategy, and why it made business sense (or
didn't) to support SystemC, System Verilog, and acquire silicon IP.
It was interesting to hear a different perspective, though I prefer a
more direct engineering treatment of the topics.
- John Busco of Nvidia
Ray said verification is a commercial asset for his company thus they
invest in it. I though he was right but this was a very short and
strange speech -- 15 minutes only???
- Boaz Ben-Nun of Starcore DSP
I can't remember Ray's message. :-( Generally, such messages are
long-term big picture messages. Unless they discuss earth shattering
paradigm shifts, the more practical messages of the technical session,
tutorial, and vendor booths at DVcon are much more interesting.
- Jim Lear of Legerity
It was, er, rather short ... His platform verification argument was
not useful, since all the vendors have a solution for mixed language
Verilog/VHDL/SystemC and HW acceleration migration paths. The best
argument for Cadence was probably speed, capacity and closeness to the
standard. Some of these vendors also have a very credible System
Verilog solution, too, which Ray certainly played down. However
Cadence better have a solution for System Verilog soon or else they
could become irrelevant.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Ray's position was to support what users need in a platform approach.
It came off to me as a slight aimed at Synopsys for dictating
System Verilog to their users.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Marketing.
- Carl Harvey of Cirrus Logic
Yes, one of the speakers. Forgot what he said already. Just
remembered some talks about the outsourcing to Asia. Funny topic.
- Fred Liao of S3 Graphics
Ray has a promising career as a presidential spokesman. Uses lots of
words to say nothing.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Ray Bingham's speech:
- Very Short!!!!
- Verification is a complete mess.
- You need a lot of different things to get your verification done.
(VHDL, Verilog, SystemC, e, Vera, ....)
- His Incisive verification solution is a Swiss Army knife,
providing an ordered collection of different things to get
the verification job done.
Ray considers this unified verification.
- Cor Schepens of Adveda
Never heard of him. Is what he has to say important?
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
I didn't think much.
- Hsing Hsieh of Hitachi
Ray Bingham didn't say a damn thing. All he did was pitch new product
packaging from Cadence. I'm obviously biased being from a competitor
but if I had to guess, I'd say he didn't think to hard about it and at
the last minute he re-hashed some old marketing slides. Weak.
- Michael Carnes of ModelTech
Short speech. Too big picture. Nothing revolutionary or enlightening.
Ray didn't seem to have much passion or interest in being there. Speech
seemed like a high-level warm-fuzzy that you would present to the press
or analysts that had no idea what business you were in. Not much
knowledge or insight gained after hearing Ray's speech. Save the money
next time.
- Brian Jensen of Mentor Graphics
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