Working behind the scenes, here's what Pallab Chatterjee, Cliff Cummings,
Howard Landman, Stu Sutherland, and I (plus a dozen other EDA users who
wished to remain anon) thought were the best frontend and backend tools
at the recent DAC 06:

               1.) Cadence Precision Router (CPR)
               2.) Mentor Calibre nmDRC
               3.) Synopsys PrimeYield
               4.) Magma Talus
               5.) Sierra Olympus
               6.) Extreme XT Suite vs. PrimeTime-VX
               7.) Nangate Library Characterizer
               8.) IC Manage Project Manager
               9.) Axiom MPsim
              10.) Bluespec BSV
              11.) CoWare Virtual Platform Designer (VPD)
              12.) Veritools Verifyer

Enclosed in the link below are our meaty, detailed technical interviews
we did live on the DAC floor on each of these tools:

          http://www.deepchip.com/demos/best_of_dac06.fhtml

To do a project like this at DAC chowed 2 days that we all could have
spent otherwise at the conference.  Also there were a lot of EDA vendor
politics we had to push through to do user-driven interviews like this.
The EDA vendors wanted happy-happy, joy-joy interviews; while Pallab, Cliff
and I wanted *real* discussion about the tools.  But our interviews are
messy.  Nothing was scripted.  Nothing was "approved" beforehand.  We just
asked honest questions and let the conversation flow naturally.  As an EDA
user, my question to you is: was this worth the effort?  Or would you be
just as happy with closed infomercial-style "success stories" where the
EDA vendor has 100% control of every question and every answer?

In short, is open EDA video reporting like this helpful to you?  Should we
fight to do this again next year?  Or not?  We'd really like to know.