( ESNUG 376 Item 8 ) -------------------------------------------- [08/29/01]
From: "John Cooley" <jcooley@world.std.com>
Subject: Magma Gets $25 Million & Is Pissed That Cooley Can't Time Travel
Dear ESNUGers,
Check out http://www.eedesign.com/story/OEG20010821S0057 if you want some
more verbatum EDA spin-doctoring reactions to the DAC Trip Report. It's a
hoot! If the report says good things about their products, I'm a saint.
If the report says bad things, I'm an evil misguided Synopsys puppet.
And it gets positively schizophrec if I do both! For example, the Cadence
Marketing VP, Dave DeMaria, loved me because the report said great things
about Cadence Testbuilder, but hates me on PKS because I count such silly
things as customer tapeouts. He even does selective listening:
"For example, he repeatedly asserts that, because non-Synopsys
products are not as heavily discussed in a Synopsys user forum,
they aren't as successful in the marketplace as Synopsys products.
This obviously is not a logical conclusion."
This was in response to my saying that I didn't find much PKS talk in ESNUG.
What Dave's *not* responding to is that I *also* said that over the past 12
months comp.cad.cadence had 1,250 posts with only 4 PKS related letters AND
that I found 17 companies hiring designers to use PhysOpt and only 1 company
seeking someone to run PKS on dice.com & monster.com. Dave *completely*
ignored these two other facts in his spin-doctoring. Hole? What hole?
And the Magma VP of Marketing, Milan Lazich, totally ripped into me because
I reiterated their financial troubles (complete with analysts' quotes) in
the DAC Report instead of praising the $25 million in bridge funding Magma
got. He was furious! Milan flat out said I'm a Synopsys puppet.
"A final thought: What do you think the 'S' in John's 'ESNUG' stands
for? He is hardly an independent observer of the EDA industry.
One company emerged relatively unscathed in his DAC review (have
you heard any complaints from Synopsys about Cooley's coverage?).
I know unbiased reporting has always been your practice, but such
goals are threatened when a journalist's sources don't share those
aspirations."
It got interesting when I called Magma and I told them to go look at the
date on the DAC Report. (8/14/01) Then I said: "let's look at the date
on your new $25 million story." (8/17/01) I then told them if I could
time travel, I'd be buying lotto tickets -- NOT reading future EDA reports!
They promptly went "Oh..." and realized that I wasn't picking on them. :)
On a technical note, the Magma VP claimed in his rant that:
"BlastFusion works only on 100K to 200K blocks: That's news to our
customers who are using it for larger designs. 3DLabs has done a
tapeout of a chip of more than 8M gates and the largest single flat
block in that design was about 3M gates. We routinely do 3-4M
gates flat."
I noted that's a VERY BIG CLAIM because everyone else is struggling with
hierarchical flows BECAUSE Magma/PhysOpt/PKS can only do 100K to 360K
blocks. (Even Magma itself announced a hierarchical tool because of this
problem!) Now if Magma can do 4 million gates flat, as their VP says,
THAT'S NEWS. Over the past 9 days I've been phoning and e-mailing the
Magma people to get a user to confirm that they really can do 3-4 million
gates FLAT. Magma keeps replying the 3Dlabs people will confirm this, but
so far, I've received nothing whatsoever from any Magma user on anything.
After 9 days, I'm no longer holding my breath here.
- John Cooley
the ESNUG guy
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