Posts filed under 'EDA'
July 23rd, 2008
I researched an opinion piece for SCDSource about three weeks ago that is up on the site today at “How Cadence’s Mentor buy would impact EDA startups.” I start from the following premise:
I believe that the merger will be consummated, but that Cadence will not remain as one of the top three players in the industry within two to four years. I have three reasons:
- EDA is an R&D intensive business and it will be hard to retain talent in a hostile takeover. Moreover, there is considerable overlap in a number of product areas, which means that many Cadence employees will also be concerned for their continued employment, injecting uncertainty and slowing work on both sides of the merged company.
- Cadence is taking on significant debt and will have to focus on near term revenue at a time when design methodologies, development practices, and computing paradigms are all undergoing significant shifts. Their ability to nurture the new products they will need in two to four years will be limited.
- New customers are coming into the market as electronic systems incorporate more software at all levels of integration. Cadence’s ability to market and sell beyond the hardware engineering groups, and to invest ahead of revenue from relevant software teams, will be limited.
By coincidence today was the Cadence Q2 earnings call, available at http://biz.yahoo.com/cc/7/94067.html (and transcript here: http://seekingalpha.com/article/86645-cadence-design-systems-inc-q2-2008-earnings-call-transcript?source=yahoo&page=-1) for the next week and then on the Cadence site. They have revised revenue downward for the year from $1.5 Billion to $1.12 Billion, with minimal profitability. One thing I had overlooked in the earlier analysis was that they have spent about $500 million buying back their own stock from the middle of last year through March of this year: stock that is worth perhaps 35-50% less now, and money that might have been used to offset the $1.1 Billion in borrowing they need to consummate the merger with Mentor.
As of today’s call they were still full speed ahead on merger plans, as of July 11 they have acquired 4.7 million share of Mentor (about 4.3% of the outstanding shares). With that possibility still very real, I want to highlight two key strategies that I also covered in the article:
- Think longer term. Because Cadence/Mentor will be focused even more ruthlessly on near term revenue, now is the time to focus on long term opportunities and relationships.
- Focus on revenue opportunities where turmoil at Cadence/Mentor will cloud the future of many products, and slow if not inhibit a competitive response until they determine who is in charge. You will more likely be able to snatch emerging technology areas where revenue opportunities are smaller from a Cadence/Mentor perspective but still very attractive for a startup.
Postscript Aug 1: Seeking Alpha has the Cadence quarterly earnings calls transcripts available for Q4/2005 onward here: http://seekingalpha.com/symbol/cdns/transcripts
July 22nd, 2008
I just added Cadence to the list of companies with blogs on my May 28 post “Bloggers Covering Design Automation.” I didn’t see any announcement but they appear to have re-designed their website in the last three or four weeks and now highlight a community of bloggers on their home page.
My simple projection is that within three years every EDA company, large or small, will have at least one blog, and EDA consulting firms of all sizes will add a blog to their website. So that says we are on track to grow from 70 to over 500. I base this in part on the speed on adoption of the web by EDA firms and what’s already happened for web startups and many other emerging technology spaces: entrepreneurs consider a blog a core component of their corporate identity.
Making sense of 500 feeds will be no easier than surfing across 500 television channels to find something new and worth reading. I mentioned David Lin’s experimental Netvibes page in my “Primer on Blogs for EDA Start-Ups” and it certainly represents a good start. But I think an opportunity exists for community lens approach similar to what Hacker News provides web entrepreneurs (which is different in some important but subtle ways from digg and reddit that allow it to avoid the death of the lowest common denominator topics migrating to the home page). Other models are certainly viable as well, based on forums, wikis, and new forms both emerging and yet to be invented.
Paul Saffo’s 1994 Wired article “It’s the Context Stupid” (also available on www.saffo.com/essays/contextstupid.php) makes the point that the value is as much in providing context as the raw content.
“It’s the content, stupid.” This catchy apothegm [is] now the mantra of an infant new media industry. […] As compelling as this phrase may be, it is also dead wrong. It is not content but context that will matter most a decade or so from now. The scarce resource will not be stuff, but point of view.
[…]
The future belongs to neither the conduit or content players, but those who control the filtering, searching, and sense-making tools we will rely on to navigate through the expanses of cyberspace.
One example of a hybrid model of journalism is what John Byler is doing at Chip Design magazine in adding 8 blogs to complement his print publication. I was particularly impressed by a recent post by Grant Martin on “Leibson’s Law in Action? Cadence returns to ESL with new synthesis tool” because he did something that is natural for a blogger and highly unusual for an article in an on-line paper or magazine: he links to whoever has the best information on the topic, even it’s a competitor to Chip Design. It’s not only a very useful summary that places several recent ESL announcements in context, but Martin links to the source material on-line, regardless of where it came from: EE Times, SCDSource, EDN, and Chip Design Mag. And he has comments from a number of key players ESL.
I was talking to a well respected EDA PR professional recently who was waiting for the EDA blogging ecosystem to sort itself out and pick a dozen “A” blogs so that it would resemble the good old days of print (and EDA PR could “return to normal”). I said I didn’t think that would happen because blogging uses links for context in a way that print didn’t (and can’t). On any given topic there may only be a dozen well respected bloggers, but there would be a lot of topics with different sets for each. It’s different when you have knowledgeable practitioners writing directly on the web.
I believe Grant Martin’s post is a harbinger for a very different kind of “sense-making mechanism” than both traditional EDA print journalism and the press release aggregation model that’s practiced on a number of websites. Not necessarily better (or worse) but different.
We have time to get ready, and since we are all steering we may end up somewhere else. But I think 500 blogs (plus or minus 250) is likely by 2011 because it they don’t depend upon a business model transition: blogs are like weeds, they don’t require cultivation to thrive. I think they create a substrate that complements and potentially displaces the press release with the RSS/Atom feed as the quantum unit of information distribution for (social) media.
June 30th, 2008
After I offered “7 Tips for Encouraging Bloggers to Write About a Conference,” Gabe Moretti, the editor of the DACeZine, asked me to contribute an article on blogging (I guess that could have been my eighth tip). It appeared in the June 26 DACeZine. What follows is a version of the article appropriate for a blog post: same content, more links. I think these tips are actually useful for any software start-up.
History & Definitions
Blogs are a “new” social software technology that have been in use for more than a decade. The name “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger in 1997 and shortened to “blog” in 1999 by Peter Merholz. Both describe a website with one or more of the following characteristics:
- Permalink: each page or article has a permanent URL called a permalink that allows other sites to reference it uniquely for the life of the website. This inhibits link rot and allows useful references and backlinks to accumulate over time.
- Reverse Chron: there is normally an index that presents the articles in reverse chronological order (newest first) which answers the question “What’s New?”
- Comments: each article has a footer that allows readers to add comments. Registration can be required to inhibit spam, but in effect, each article can have a forum thread associated with it.
- Trackbacks: notifications to other blogs (and content management systems that accept them) that they have been referenced in a published article. These trackbacks may be appended as comments after the referenced article on the remote site to let readers know who else is referring to it.
- Categories: may be defined in an ad hoc way for a site and appended as tags (metadata) for each article. Sometimes, these tags may be shared between blogs to facilitate easy reference about common events or issues.
- Syndication Feeds: typically based on one or more versions of RSS and Atom, allow readers to aggregate content from many blogs. They are essentially a machine readable format of “What’s New” that tracks and displays a summary or the full text of the last few articles published.
- BlogRoll: a list of other blogs that are suggested reading by the blog author(s).
There are many blogging systems and not all of them support all of these features. Not every blog has all of these features enabled, but a minimum feature set would normally include permalinks, a reverse chronological index, and syndication feeds.
EDA Blogs
There are more than 70 blogs relevant to Electronic Design Automation, and the first “EDA Bloggers Birds of a Feather” meeting was held at this year’s DAC. As a part of the preparation for that event, I developed a list of “Bloggers Covering Electronic Design Automation” that David Lin of Denali published on Netvibes.
Starting the Conversation
Tim O’Reilly has observed that a blog acts as a dial tone for a website: it signals a commitment for interaction and participation on the part of the authors. Current blogging activity substantiates that a start-up is open for business. This can be an issue when the website has not been updated for six months!
EDA software and consulting services both require an ongoing relationship for a customer to get full value out of the initial decision to engage. This means that a purchase decision, especially for start-ups, can look a lot like a hiring decision. By exposing your thinking and demonstrating your expertise on your blog, you allow your prospects to get to know you better even before they write that first email or pick up the phone. Whether they see you listed at a tradeshow, see an article you’ve written, or hear about you from a colleague, they will almost always check your website before contacting you. If you let them get to know you and proactively answer their likely questions, you allow them to make more productive use of their time and make your first conversation that much more useful for both of you.
Key Benefits From a Blog
- Using permalinks for your content means that the highly linked articles accumulate a higher preference in search engines (e.g. Google) which means you are more likely to be found, especially if you are blogging about something of interest to your prospects.
- Using feeds means that new articles will get into the search engine caches, where they can be found by prospects; in a matter of hours rather than waiting for an indexing spider to visit your site every two or three weeks.
- A blog allows you to respond frequently and in real time to events, issues, and new information that are relevant to your prospects and your business. News releases still have a role but are better reserved for key communications.
- A blog also replaces the “What’s New” page for your website with a much more powerful structure that’s better connected with other websites.
Tips for Better Blogging
- Plan ahead. Map out a calendar of subjects to cover one or two a week for the next month or two; this will help you focus on these topics in other media and help you avoid writer’s block.
- Offer Perspective. Don’t just rehash other articles, blog posts, and news stories. Add your own insights and expertise—and keep the content clear, focused and professional.
- Report. Tie your subject matter to topical events such as talks, conferences, seminars, or trade shows you’ve attended, adding your own insights from those events.
- Focus for effect. Pick a set of topics that are relevant to your business and your (prospective) customers. (For non-business-related topics, create a second personal blog.)
- Do it often. Shorter, more frequent posts are best (around 200 to 400 words and at least once a week). Try making just three points per issue relevant to your intended audience.
- Choose clear titles. Keep titles short and use words that are familiar and relevant to your readers.
- Cite references. Include links for your citations to increase your credibility and make your blog more useful, reliable and better integrated into the blogosphere.
- Write with Integrity. Disclose all relevant information about your financial interests in the topic and only write what you know to be true.
June 9th, 2008
Since I am at DAC this week I will use the DAC website as a representative example.
- Add a blog that allows (moderated) comments and (moderated) trackbacks.
DAC: Not yet.
- Give every session and every event a permalink.
DAC: This is actually true for the last seven and a half conferences (back to 37th post conference site). The URLs are a little funky but here is a pointer to session 1 of the 39th DAC
- Give every session and every event trackbacks so that you can see who has blogged about them.
DAC: Not Yet
- Add RSS/Atom feeds for both events and announcements.
DAC: Not Yet
- Link every presenter’s name to their home page (blog, personal site, IEEE personal page, or other they supply) so that it’s easy to learn more about them. Add a link to their affiliated organization (college, university, firm, government entity, non-profit). I actually did this for the 1995 HDLCon (admittedly a smaller show than DAC) and it added a lot to your ability to do some quick background research.
DAC: Not Yet
- Realize that you are writing a website first, with content that may re-purposed into e-mail newsletters and print. This means using hyperlinks to provide pointers to relevant information.
DAC: Not yet; while the DACeZine is a great addition it’s an on-line magazine that obeys all of the strictures of print.
- Make Wifi available ubiquitously at the conference.
DAC: Yes! (at least for the 45th at Anaheim Convention Center)
June 8th, 2008
The emotional ambience at DAC (the Design Automation Conference) is what you get when you pour the excitement of a high school science fair, the sense of the recurring wheel of life from the movie Groundhog Day, and the auld lang syne of a high school re-union, and hit frappe.
Some related quotes–at least I believe them to be:
A glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon.
C. S. Lewis
Knowing is not understanding. There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.
Charles Kettering
Knowledge comes by taking things apart: analysis. But wisdom comes by putting things together.
John A. Morrison
The first point of wisdom is to discern that which is false; the second is to know that which is true.
Lactantius
Maturity means reacquiring the seriousness one had as a child at play
Friedrich Nietzsche
May 28th, 2008
Ever since EE Times laid off Richard Goering (and seemed like it was no longer committed to covering EDA) I have been meaning to map the EDA Blogosphere. When JL Gray suggested a Blogging Birds of a Feather at DAC (scheduled for Wednesday June 11 6pm in Room 201B in the Anaheim Convention Center) I volunteered to help him and Harry Gries organize it, along with David Lin and John Ford. Final details are being worked out but it looks like Steve Leibson, Grant Martin, and George Harper will also be giving 3 minute lightning talks on different aspects of blogging.
There is also an edabloggers Yahoo Group you can sign up for if you want to be notified of updates, if this one goes well we may facilitate others at appropriate EDA-related conferences.
So this event was the spur I needed to uncover about sixty bloggers covering some aspect of electronic design automation:
What was surprising to me was how few companies had blogs, but I suspect that will change in EDA as it already has for Software as a Service and Internet/Web companies. If your blog is not on this list (or it’s on the list and you would like it taken off) please contact me. Bloggers and those interested in learning more about blogging are welcome at the DAC Blogging Birds of a Feather Wed June 11 6pm in Room 201B. Other posts about the event:
Update June 16: I continue to add to the list almost daily as overlooked bloggers E-mail me or leave comments. My plan is to keep this list updated here for at least another two or three months.
Update July 22: I added the Cadence blogging community to the list and blogged about “What Happens When 70 EDA Blogs Become 500 in 2011.“
May 14th, 2008
It’s been 18 months since I last wrote about NuSym, a hardy perennial in EDA that’s a testament to the unique value of venture funding in building an EDA company (Athena Design is another). Perhaps only a venture backed EDA startup can launch without a product or a customer (note to bootstrappers: please don’t try this at home). Some excerpts from today’s press release “Nusym Debuts with Focus on Intelligent Verification” follow:
LOS GATOS, Calif., May 14, 2008 — Nusym Technology, Inc. formally introduced itself today as a verification solutions provider targeting one of the most critical problems in electronic design: developing confidence in the design in a fraction of the time and resources of current methods. Nusym is focused on an “Intelligent Verification” approach that leverages design insight to automatically drive rapid verification closure.
No discussion of the most significant breakthrough in verification in the last decade (although the careers page still promises “the most exciting EDA opportunity in a decade”).
The company has raised $8 million of capital to date. Nusym’s investment funding comes from premiere firms such as Woodside Funds, Draper Richards, L.P., as well as prominent EDA veterans, including Lucio Lanza and John Sanguinetti.
That’s up from $6 million when Richard Goering interviewed Venk Shukla, Nusym’s CEO, in December 2006 on his pre-SCDSource EET blog.
Nusym’s technology is currently being evaluated on a number of leading edge designs at its semiconductor partners. Nusym will announce its flagship product at a later date.
Why did they launch? Can you have a launch if you can’t give your product a name–although DeNibulator has a nice ring to it–and can’t get a customer to stand up?
“We find Nusym to have a very promising verification technology. It can run on very large design blocks and target hard to hit coverage points”, said Dan Smith, Director of CAD for NVIDIA.
I had thought they were aiming for chip level verification. The phrase “very promising” doesn’t give much indication of when NVIDIA might become a customer. One the other hand it reads like something an engineering director would say, a lot of startups are tempted to stuff their positioning (”rapid verification closure” in the case of NuSym) into a customer’s mouth.
Net net, they’ve raised another $2M and are going to DAC, but it’s looking less and less like there is a pony in there.
Details as they reveal the translucent, like the excited ragged breath of school children clustered at the window for the first snow of winter exposes the hand prints left on the glass from the start of school.
Postscript July 30: Why the Athena Design link no longer works. In an article in today’s EE Times Athena Design Systems: websites down, numbers disconnected by Peter Clarke notes
EDA company Athena Design Systems Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.), appears to have shut up shop.
Two websites used by the company, www.athenadesign.com and www.athenads.com , are now “under construction.” Telephone numbers are “disconnected or no longer in service.”
Athena was founded in 2003 by IC extraction expert Dimitris Fotakis. The company announced it had raised $4 million in venture capital funding in January 2007, bringing the total to $8.2 million. That round added PhillipsCapital and NTT Finance Corporation, to the company’s initial investors, who included Woodside Fund, Asset Management Company, and Draper Richards. The money was earmarked for the worldwide rollout of Athena’s first products.
Athena was included in the EE Times Silicon 60 version 6.1 list of companies to watch but dropped off version 7.0 of the list, published in February 2008.
October 11th, 2007
I first met Rick Munden more than a decade ago when we were both managers attending an Electronic Design Process workshop. I ran into him last December at an SDForum Emerging Technologies SIG meeting and we renewed our acquaintance. I invited him to our Bootstrappper’s Breakfast since he was mulling his new company Epiphyte. This interview grew out of several conversations that we’ve had in the last year. They have been condensed, spell checked, and hyperlinked for your reading pleasure.
Q: You’ve been entrepreneurial since high school. Could you talk about your first company?
My first legal business was a newsstand in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood in 1965 when I was 15. I started it with a friend, Bob Katzman. It was a third kid’s idea but he was not inclined to follow through on it.
I sold my half of the business to Bob after about 16 months (and I was old enough to get a technical job). He grew the newsstand into a chain of bookstores over the following 20 years. Bob has written books about the newsstand and Chicago in that era and blogs at Different Slants.
Q: What were some of the key things you’ve learned from that?
The two things I took away from the experience were a respect for my customers–they are the most important part of any business– and the realization that retailing is not intellectually stimulating for me.
Q: You’ve also been involved in semiconductors, system design, and CAD/CAE for a number of years. What were some of the more interesting problems you had to solve?
I managed design engineering environments from 1987 till 2006, first at TRW in Redondo Beach, CA, then at Acuson/Siemens Ultrasound in Mountain View. During that time, although I had to support everything from chips to systems, including mechanical and software. I was personally more focused on board and system level design and verification.
I found the heart of any CAE system to be the libraries. In a company designing anything but the simplest boards, the libraries must be architected and optimized for efficient data transfer across a variety of tools, often from different vendors. The libraries I designed contained schematic symbols, PCB footprints, electrical information, purchasing information, signal integrity models, functional simulation models, timing information, and traceability information.
Q: What tools or methodologies did you develop that you still use?
The most important thing developed was the simulation modeling methodology. Fortunately, I had some very smart people working with me and we were able to come up with a modeling practice that has needed only a couple of tweaks over the past 12 years. We came up with a coding style based on VHDL/VITAL that allowed us to model a wide range of digital components that we could find no other way to accurately model. VHDL/VITAL was not the first thing we tried but, looking back, I think it was a fortuitous choice.
Q: You also started the Free Model Foundry, can you talk about what led you to do that?
When I was a manager at TRW, one of the engineering problems we had was how to simulate a board in order to reduce or eliminate the number of prototype board spins. Board spins were expensive and consumed way too much schedule. The biggest obstacle to simulation was the lack of models of the parts we wanted to use.
This was in the early ’90s so every tool vendor had their own proprietary simulator and models created for one would not work on any other. I had been writing models for several years but every time we switched EDA vendors I had to start over again.
Then VHDL came out. At first there were compatibility problems and none of the big companied could make simulators that implemented the full language. Eventually, a number of startups succeeded and were soon bought by the major players. In response, Cadence opened up Verilog.
Cadence had Verilog-XL and another product called Veritime that was a static timing verifier that read Verilog models. We thought “wouldn’t it be great if we could write one model that could be used for both dynamic simulation and static timing verification?”
We tried writing some models of small ECL parts in Verilog but could not model all the functionality. We hired some professionals to do the job but they also failed. Then we tried to netlist one of our Cadence schematics to Verilog and found out how difficult that was. We managed to get one design through the process but it was a very bad experience.
About that time, the VHDL/VITAL standard was being tested. One of my colleagues, Russ Vreeland, investigated and suggested we try it. The results were great. We could model our ECL parts easily and Cadence’s VHDL netlister was much better than their Verilog netlister. The next step was to populate our library.
There are a lot of digital parts in the world and people keep designing new ones. TRW did not want to be in the modeling business and at that time, neither did the IC companies. We thought if we documented a successful modeling strategy and published the models we created for our own use, other engineers would join in. Sharing models would be much more efficient than everyone re-writing the same ones. I have been a long time fan of the Free Software Foundation so I suggested we do something along those same lines for simulation models.
In 1995 two other TRW engineers and I incorporated the Free Model Foundation. Because we were trying to solve a problem rather than create a business, we incorporated as a not-for-profit. It took a couple of years to get our tax status set by the IRS and the State of California. In the process, our name was changed to Free Model Foundry.
For a couple of years, we wrote models at TRW and published them. But rather than the ground swell of models we expected to receive from other engineers, we started getting calls from IC companies asking if they could outsource their modeling to us.
It took a while to find the best resources for contract modeling but eventually we did and now model outsourcing has become FMF’s business.
Q: What have you learned about outsourcing? Any guidelines for what kinds of project should be outsourced and what shouldn’t?
I have seen many outsourcing projects go well and a few turn into complete disasters. Differences have been in project scope and the definition of the project deliverables. In general, small, well defined projects are more likely to be successfully outsourced than large poorly defined ones. Communications also plays a roll. The bigger the project, the more important good communications become and the more often it must take place.
I recommend a book titled “Global Software Development” by Dale Walter Karolak and published by the IEEE Computer Society. It covers all the basics in 158 pages.
Q: You are involved in some EDA Open Source efforts. Can you talk about any that you find exciting?
Other than FMF, my involvement with other Open Source EDA efforts is limited to cheerleader and occasionally facilitator. I host a monthly dinner which is attended by people interested in OSEDA.
Q: How would you compare the impact of Open Source vs. Outsourcing on Electronic Design and EDA?
EDA users are a small community. This makes open source less viable for EDA tools than in other areas such operating systems. There are only a few large open source EDA projects going on. I think all of them consist of a single person doing more than 90% of the work and a number of less committed people giving feedback. Smaller projects, such as a Verilog mode for Emacs, work fine.
Projects that are easily outsourced are often also viable as open source projects if they benefit a large enough community. The two examples that come to mind are FMF and OpenCores. These are organized quite differently but they have similar benefits to the engineering community.
Q: For your latest company, Epiphyte, can you talk a little bit about your plans for 2008?
The new company is Epiphyte LLC. It is a platform for exploring various business opportunities. The expectation is that we will try many different things and fail (cheaply) at most of them. The stated purpose of Epiphyte LLC. is for the “rapid exploitation of emerging opportunities”. This roughly translates to “we don’t know what we’re going to do but, we have a lot of ideas”. Among the more likely opportunities are:
- Provide IT support for startups, small businesses and non-profits. We serve organizations that require less than one FTE.
- Provide outsourcing project management for small HW/SW projects. We advise clients on the suitability of the project, help finalize the specifications, find and contract with the performing engineers or organization, manage the communications between the customer and the performer. The trick is to know what can and cannot be successfully outsourced, how to specify the work, and manage the customer expectation. Of course, it also helps to know competent organizations that can do the work.
- Provide contractor management services to companies that desire to keep existing contractors beyond the one year limit HR departments set.
Q: Epiphyte is also supporting “Venture Coding.” What is this and why you are offering it?
We have created a new process to assist start up companies in getting off of the ground that we call “Venture Coding.” Early start up companies often face the dual problems of limited starting funds and the limited engagement (and interest) of short term developers. Venture Coding was conceived to solve both of these problems.
In exchange for equity in a start up, Epiphyte will provide software development resources. This allows a company to preserve precious starting capital and to ensure the continued availability of developer commitment to the success of the start up.s
August 21st, 2007
I attended today’s Fabless Semiconductor Association Distinguished Speaker Series Luncheon Panel on “Fostering, Funding and Focusing on the Future of Innovation.” Richard Weber, CEO of Semifore, had a 2 for 1 ticket and invited me to tag along. It was time well spent. It was moderated by Brian Fuller, the former Editor-in-Chief of EE Times, and now a VP with Blanc & Otus.
Brian opened with an analogy between the US railroad industry before and after the first transcontinental connection was completed in 1869. Considered the greatest US technological feat of the 19th century, the railroads’ focus shifted from engineering to operations and marketing. It was a panel with deep experience in the industry.
- Syed Ali, President, CEO & Founder, Cavium Networks
- Paul Franklin, Vice President of Operations, Atheros Communications, Inc.
- Alan Gorlick, Member of Faculty, University of Phoenix
- Jack Harding, Chairman, President & CEO, eSilicon Corporation
- Chris Rust, General Partner, U.S. Venture Partners
The economics of a new (fabless) semiconductor startup (note that integrated semiconductor fabrication operations are the province of a few major players, these days fabs are funded by governments) requires tens of millions of dollars of risk capital to reach a break-even operation level. A mask set alone may set you back between two and three million dollars. New ventures are the province of serious folks with deep experience, as Chris Rust remarked of other VC firms that had shifted new investment focus away from semiconductors “the tourists have gone home.” It’s a very different proposition from starting a software company, although EDA is more challenging than Web 2.0.
June 25th, 2007
Richard Wallace pens a “Note to Our Readers” in the morning edition of EE Times on-line (hyperlinks added):
Last week CMP Technology, a part of United Business Media and parent company of this newspaper, announced sweeping editorial management changes at EE Times and TechOnline, eetimes.com’s sister Web site. The changes will accelerate the expansion of CMP’s technology media portfolio and hasten the transformation of our staff to an online media orientation–a historic shift from traditional print-centric publishing.
David Needle in “Tech Publisher CMP Restructures” characterizes this as recognizing reality: “CMP announced a major restructuring that includes shuttering some print titles and cutting about 200 jobs, an 18 percent reduction in staff. The Manhasset, N.Y., tech publisher said the move was prompted by a decline in print revenue and growth of its online and events business.” Richard Wallace continues
The changes involve the consolidation of the EE Times and TechOnline editorial teams while strengthening both brands’ online offerings for design engineers and engineering managers.
Change and attrition are the only constants for journalists today; last week this meant saying goodbye to longtime colleagues and friends. So before the pundits and bloggers go into overdrive, we’d like to introduce our new team, acknowledge the contributions of some departing colleagues and explain what these changes signify.
As a blogger I am barely in first gear so it’s probably safe to comment. To be sure a number of other technology magazines have had their print runs curtailed if not eliminated (EE Times has less than half the page count it did from five years ago). My concerns or at least puzzlement come from two paragarphs near the end.
Topical coverage in areas such as communications, consumer electronics and industry developments in China and Japan will be augmented by freelance contributions as we also thank Richard Goering, Yoshiko Hara, Mike Clendenin, Paul O’Shea and Alex Mendelsohn for their years of service to this newspaper and TechOnline.
EDA coverage will now be the purview of the entire editorial team, with increasing focus on contributed articles. EDA application coverage is already a staple of TechOnline DesignLines, PlanetAnalog.com, PLDesignLine.com and embedded.com.
I don’t quite understand why Richard Goering wasn’t able to change orientation to online media, I have been reading his words on-line for a while now and he’s one of the better bloggers that EET has. If EDA is everyone’s responsibility, it will be no one’s responsibility. Doubtless Goering will take a job somewhere else that involves publishing on-line, so there must be more to the story.
What are some near term strategies that startups should consider now that Goering won’t be profiling all of the little guys?
- If you don’t have a blog on your website, you should add one now and post at least weekly. Take time to follow some of the emerging EDA oriented bloggers as they may very well become an important source of context on your firm.
- Consider smaller regional conferences like Mentor’s EDA Tech Forum as a more important source of leads. MP Associates should consider adding magazines/print to their conference line-up (DAC, ICCAD, DVCon, …) to pick up the slack in coverage. EDA Tech Forum also publishes a quarterly journal.
- The size of your website is measured by the number of inbound links from other quality sites. Become more active in EDA oriented on-line forums (e.g. Verification Guild, SOC Central, EDA Cafe, CADWire, Deep Chip, and Linux Electrons, all come to mind).
This shift to on-line and events is not unique to CMP: Pat McGovern, president of IDG, the parent of recently shuttered InfoWorld had the following observation in an interview in March of 2007 with Mediashift’s Mark Glaser
McGovern: We’ve made an interesting re-definition about what business we’re in. We always thought of ourselves as [print] publishers who did websites and conferences. Now the website typically has a bigger audience than print, and it’s growing much more rapidly. We used to be a publishing company with ancillary websites and events, but now we’re a web-centric information company, and we have ancillary activities like print publications and events.
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