Holy crap!  Gabe Moretti just reported in his blog that Cadence is going to
be coming back to DAC next year after all!

  "San Jose, November 7 -- This afternoon Lee Wood, exhibit manager of
   the 44th DAC, received a contract from Cadence Design Automation
   reserving 2400 square feet of floor space for their exhibit booth."

Wow!  Talk about turnarounds.  For the longest time Fister & Co. pushed a
policy of Let's-Surround-The-Customers-With-Cadence-Sales-Guys-Only when it
did that infamous Technology On Tour show in a hotel near the recent DAC.

           http://www.deepchip.com/wiretap/060615.html

The small EDA vendors didn't like it.  One even chastised Cadence for being
a bad 800 lb gorilla that was not supporting the EDA ecosystem:

           http://www.deepchip.com/wiretap/060616.html

The idea was to poach the customers off the DAC floor, but from the gossip
I had heard, it wasn't too successful.  Cadence just couldn't get big numbers
of them to walk the 2 blocks to the San Francisco Four Seasons Hotel to
justify the expense.  It got even weirder when Cadence pulled that "I'm
taking my baseball mitt and going home" stunt at the last minute last year:

           http://www.deepchip.com/wiretap/060727.html

Users had a bad reaction.  They thought Cadence was being arrogant:

           http://www.deepchip.com/wiretap/060802.html

Along with Gabe and Gary dinging Cadence's stupidity:

           http://www.deepchip.com/wiretap/060803.html
           http://www.deepchip.com/wiretap/060804.html

It got even weirder still when Cadence disinvited all its rival EDA vendors
from attending its CDN Live sales roadshow a la the Intel Developer Forum.
I even jokingly wondered if the DAC Executive Committee had put a voodoo
curse on Cadence in:

           http://www.deepchip.com/wiretap/060817.html

As I wrote before, trying to kill DAC never hurt the big guys like Synopsys,
Mentor, or Magma -- because they each have 1,000-man armies of marketing and
field guys directly talking to their customers every day.  Cadence was only
hurting the small EDA start-ups that didn't have such a channel.

But with this recent DAC news, it looks like Mike Fister has maybe decided
to stop acting like the unilateral George Bush of EDA and to start playing
nice with the other (both big & small) EDA children.  Maybe.