A few weeks ago I went to the ARM TechCon3, formerly the ARM Developer Conference (Still can’t figure out why they changed the name, now it makes no sense). I went because I was getting a flood of requests for interviews. When I was plowing through the information, none of it really caught my attention, but the PR guy for Imagination Technologies was particularly persistent. When I asked for some details about what we might talk about, he directed me to a couple of web pages with typical marketing blather: lots of unsubstantiated hyperbole, or as the Bard put it “sound and fury signifying nothing.”
I decided to go to the conference armed with the marketing crap and start asking questions based on the material and see what would come out of it.
I was pleasantly surprised that Peter McGuinness of Imagination Technologies was actually able to answer my questions intelligently and convincingly. He was the only one I met who could. Well done, Peter. I actually learned something. Imagination Technologies supplies IP to large processor companies like TI and Freescale to help them eat away at market share from Nvidia in the handheld market. They seem to be doing well at it. Here’s the interview.
Ghislain Kaiser, CEO of Docea Power was my last vendor interview at DAC and one of my favorites because, well, he’s a new face in EDA and he has such a great name. It’s nice to see someone other than the usual suspects.
Docea tools help designers explore low-power architecture, with a focus on hardware/software partitioning and “support of the modern and powerful power management techniques,” whatever that means. It’s a cool technology and addresses a significant issue in engineering efficiency for SoC design.
Unfortunately, Kaiser was not able to give me a hard, bottom line accounting of what the tool does for profitability. It’s still just about the engineer and not the bottom line. Here’s the interview.
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Greg Lebsack took the reigns as CEO of Tanner EDA less than four months ago, and still had time to talk to us at New Tech Press. He came over from the same position at ASP Global Services (SaaS supply chain software) and says EDA is an industry with “potential for growth” which either means he’s smoking something really interesting, or he sees something a lot of people are missing. At least it’s good to hear from someone with a fresh perspective.
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Finding something new that might actually help the semiconductor industry become profitable is like looking for three wise men and a virgin in Las Vegas, especially when you are going through Semicon, But last week, on the second day of the conference, I had three people tell me I should go look at what Verigy was showing. I’ve always been used to seeing testers that took up entire rooms and were hot enough to cook soup in (which I have done but that’s another story). What I found was both fascinating and yet left me wanting more. That’s not a bad thing. What it was was a step in the right direction. That’s for sure. Here’s the link.
THIS IS AN UNSPONSORED PODCAST from New Tech Press
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