Here's some stories you might have missed at the recent San Diego DAC:

 - A number of EDA vendors were whining up a storm about how this year's DAC
   attendance in San Diego was down.  Last year in San Francisco there were
   7,555 registered attendees; this year it was 5,135 -- a 47% drop!  What
   the hell!?  What the EDA vendor cry babies don't get is that San Diego is
   NOT San Francisco and Diego's NOT a 90 min drive from Silicon Valley.  To
   do apples-to-apples, Anaheim 2005 was 5,421 and San Diego 2004 was 5,825;
   minor drops of 6% and 13% which are easily economic cyclic variations.
   
 - Although no one said anything, Mike Fister did a complete reversal on DAC
   with Cadence having a booth at the entrance of the exhibit hall and they
   even a Cadence customer party where they took customers to the San Diego
   Automotive Museum on DAC Monday night.  Wow.  It's not often that you get
   to see such a complete 360 degree turnaround like that in our industry;
   we-love-DAC,-we-don't-need-DAC,-we-now-love-DAC-even-more.  Wow.

 - Blaze DFM switched from being a DFM company into being a power optimizer
   company.  I didn't get to their booth until DAC Thursday and I honestly
   tried to understand how their tool worked but I was too fried to get it.

 - I heard that Brett Cline of Forte was pissed about how the SystemC use
   numbers dropped in the recent 2007 Verification Census.  I also heard that
   Moshe Gavrielov of Verisity-Cadence was also quite miffed about hearing
   his much beloved Specman "e" numbers also dropping in that same census.
   I'd love to hear their thoughts on that data.

 - Having a keynote from some US automotive bigwig might not have been such
   a great idea for an American chip design show.  The speech was a ghost
   town.  Has anyone told the DAC committe that less than 1% of new chips
   are done for US cars?  What's next?  Keynotes from the US steel industry?
   (People loved the more relevant & techie Samsung keynote guy, though.)

 - Richard Goering discovered Micrologic DA: "an Israeli company with two
   Cadence Virtuoso add-ons.  VisuaLVS is an interactive layout vs. schematic
   correction tool that 'saves days on verification,' according to CTO Danny
   Rittman, who used to be with DFM startup Bindkey."

 - What moron did the floorplan for this year's DAC exhibit floor?  Instead
   of spreading out the Big Four EDA vendors across the floor, the idiot
   clustered the Big Four booths all close to each other at the center of
   the plan.  This meant lots of traffic in the center, and hardly anyone
   going out towards the wings of the show floor.  D'oh!

 - I suspect Nangate has been involved with illegal cloning and stem cell
   research in Denmark.  They have 4 guys who work there who's first name
   is "Jens".  It's completely confusing when you first meet them.

 - How bad has EDA gotten when lawyers (Heller Ehrman, booth 2977) start
   having their own booths at DAC?  Someone should seriously talk to the
   EDAC people about changing their motto: "EDA - Where Electronics Begins"
   into something more accurate like: "EDA - Where Lawsuits Begin".

 - The Jasper folks were extra happy this year because they snagged 1,204 raw
   leads from this DAC.  Take out the duplicates and it's 967 leads.  Take
   out the professors, students, and other no-money people and it's 704 fresh
   new leads they gleefully snapped up in San Diego.

 - One PR lady commented on how Aart de Geus transformed from corporate EDA
   CEO statesman by day into a hip, cool, sunglasses-at-night-&-suede-jacket
   jazzster on stage at the Denali party.  The Cadence equivalent here is
   Mr. Ponytail Ted Vucurevich, but he stays hip even during work hours.

 - Who leaked that Cadence-is-going-private rumor to the New York Times such
   that the story broke on DAC Monday?  The timing of that story was waaaay
   too coincindental to be coincindental.  Who's chummy with NYT people?

 - My apologies to the ClearShape guys if the Cadence private rumor is true;
   nobody ever bothers putting a new pool in the backyard of a house that
   they're about to sell.  RIP ClearShape acquisition.

 - Nascentric marketing VP, Dino Caporossi, who's usually impeccably dressed
   and with coiffed hair, at DAC shaved his head 50's style, added white
   shirt, pocket protector, highwater pants & black plastic glasses -- all
   to play a 1950's rocket scientist nerd.  It's unknown how his "new look"
   impacts Dino's love life at home.  Maybe his wife is really into nerds?

 - Gary Smith's event was packed on DAC Sunday night.  Yay, Gary!  Guess he
   didn't need to be with Gartner after all.  Oh, but that preaching about
   packaging & wire connects was oh-so-wrong for a chip design EDA audience.

 - For their DAC dinner, Mentor hired 2 mildly inept jugglers.  They'd juggle
   clubs, or glowing balls, or spun ropes; slightly messing up a little on
   each.  After about 30 min, the jugglers switched over to ping-pong balls.
   They popped the ping-pong balls in and out of their mouths.  They shot
   them out of air guns at each other, etc, etc.  The big finale was lots of
   ping-pong balls shot into the audence.  As the act ended, Joe Sawicki, who
   had been sitting next to me, leans over and whispers: "You know, I've
   heard they have some much better ping-pong ball shows down in Tijuana."

If you know of any other quickie short stories that happened at this recent
DAC, drop me an email and I'll add them here.