(ICU 04 Item 9 ) ------------------------------------------------ [10/07/04]
Subject: the Cadence Users Group (ICU)
PRISONERS OF HISTORY: Cadence and Mentor have bragging rights in the EDA
industry of having the 2 oldest user's groups around; it's also their curse
because their user's groups are heavily dominated by old time PCB designers.
IC designers rate the Cadence and Mentor user's groups as very low. They
don't get a critical mass of IC designers like the Synopsys and Magma user's
groups do. It's a Catch-22. Few IC designers go to the Cadence and Mentor
user's groups *because* few IC designers go to the Cadence and Mentor user's
groups -- hence a troublesome 57% of my survey respondants said "N/A" to my
question asking them to rank the Cadence Users Group vs. the others.
How does the Cadence Users Group rank vs. the Magma/Synopsys/Mentor
users groups (Better, Equal, or Worst)?
Better: ## 4%
Equal: ######## 16%
Worst: ########### 23%
N/A: ############################ 57%
Take out that 57% N/A and it's:
Better: #### 9%
Equal: ################### 37%
Worst: ########################### 53%
On a humorous note, two of the respondants who ranked the ICU as "better"
also happened to be ICU board members.
The audience is not as widespread, and the material seems less relevant.
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Worst. They are not big enough to be efficient.
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I haven't attended a Cadence User Group meeting. I have attended Synopsys
User Group meetings and think they are very good meetings. I've attended
Mentor User Group meetings and think they are less helpful than Synopsys.
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I think the Synopsys one is better run and they hand out CD with all the
current and old SNUG presentations. I haven't visited the Mentor user
groups because we only use Mentor for back-end tools.
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ICU is by far the best. The ICUG meeting is much more useful than SNUG.
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Equal. Cadence does a good enough job supporting their users that this
user group isn't as important as the others, though.
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Worse than SNUG, lower quality of presentations
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Better! The Cadence Users Group is much more diverse and exposes the
user to a broad range of products and issues. The other groups are more
focused on a narrow range of products and cannot offer insights into
flows and full chip / board design issues.
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Better than Synopsys -- bigger, covers a wider variety of software, more
papers, more Cadence presence and support.
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Worst. There is no encouragement from Cadence to participate designers
in it. They miss the point that it is designers feedback that drive EDA
organizations. Look at VCS, TetraMAX; they were so buggy before and how
they developed and got marketshare.
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Haven't been to CUG in over 10 years.
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The Cadence Users Group spends most of their time bickering and joking,
and very little time helping with identified problems.
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Synopsys is the best I think. Very structured, useful etc.
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