Nusym De-cloaks 3

November 22nd, 2006 Sean Murphy

It’s been a month since my two posts on Nusym Technology.

• They upgraded their text treatment ( nu · sym ) to a nice logo (please note that my use of their registered trademark doesn’t imply any endorsement of this blog or me by them or any business relationship–past, present, or contemplated–between us).
• They still promise to deliver the ”most significant breakthrough in functional verification in a decade. Nusym Technology is an EDA software company that provides an order of magnitude improvement in verification productivity while capitalizing on existing verification infrastructure.” It’s hard to understand what benchmark they are measuring themselves against.
• They don’t list any of the luminaries involved in this titanic breakthrough, which leads me to wonder if some of them have left. The Captology team at Stanford has come up with some guidelines for improving the credibility of a website; here are the first four: 
1. Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.
   You can build web site credibility by providing third-party support (citations, references, source material) for information you present, especially if you link to this evidence. Even if people don’t follow these links, you’ve shown confidence in your material.
2. Show that there’s a real organization behind your site.
3. Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide.
4. Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site.
• The first two “core beliefs” on the company page have been re-phrased (compare to version in “Nusym De-cloaks” to sharpen their dislike of formal technology. Also, if #2 is correct, how did PrimeTime ever get adopted? (italics is added text, strikethrough has been deleted).
1. Dynamic verification solution. Formal technology falls short on its promise. Simulation technology continues to be the most potent bug finding tool. and will remain so for a long period of time.
2. Ease of adoption. Tools that are hard to learn and demand changes in current flow will not be embraced by the design and verification community. Tools that require a lot of effort to learn and need a lot of work upfront to get any benefit from them will never become the tools of choice for hardware designers and verification engineers.
• They still ask you to “stay tuned for the most significant breakthrough of the decade.” As I noted earlier, most early sites at least let you provide an e-mail address and promise to notify you.
• I exchanged e-mail with the Dean of EDA Journalism (admittedly it’s a small school) and he indicated he hadn’t heard what Venk and crew were actually up to. As Bill Joyner observed last year “I look to Richard to help me stay abreast of new technologies and trends and to be sure I know ‘what’s happening’ in design automation.” I do too, so either the story has been embargoed or it’s not been formulated yet.
• Nusym Technology is not listed on the 44^th DAC exhibitor list, so maybe they are going to stay “quiet” in 2007 as well. As a first time exhibitor, they can just take a “suite” and give private demos by invitation only. Details as they unfold, your mileage may vary.

Update Dec 18, 2006: Richard Goering, the dean of EDA journalism, has just posted an entry about Nusym called “Tracking an elusive verification startup” on his new blog, that includes an interview with Shukla.  I have followed up this post with “Nusym De-cloaks 4” for those half dozen of my readers still following this thread.

Entry Filed under: Startups, EDA