a mARTIAN dIARY

Just reinforce my belief (after I read it see here) that most of the innovative concepts in the EDA industry come from graduate research. And the big sharks buy them. Thats understandble in a way I guess. Calls for more industry acedemia relationship?

Point to myself—-gotta understand how the EDA industy acedemia relationship is currently structured.

and yeah….long live the start-up business model.

A very intresting article that points out One thing among many other ‘eternal truths’ about EDA industry. What the author argues about the bloating of figures…I dont know…but this seems intresting

Big companies need to embrace start-ups and the growth-by-acquisition strategy. Most big EDA companies believe that, if they stop paying 10 times more revenue for EDA start-ups, EDA entrepreneurs will work for the big EDA vendors and innovate in-house. The fact is that most big EDA innovations come from start-ups. Again, EDA is a difficult and highly specialized field. The biggest tool innovations usually start with one grad student devoting his entire academic life to solving one problem. Architects at most big EDA companies are too busy upgrading yesterday’s tools to think deeply about tomorrow’s problems. Thus, if you don’t support the start-up model, you’re killing the industry’s future.

EDA industry needs a reality check

http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA6298273

This is my humble attempt to document at a single place what has transpired at a single location in the industry that feeds me today. Why you would ask. Read on.

To understand a business it is first necessary to know and more importantly understand its history but more importantly for a typical Scorpio like me, passion is a large part of the juice that drives me and in my opinion, a true sense of history is exactly the fuel that’s required to pump up the juices.

Having arrived a little late into the industry has its own advantages and disadvantages. The sloth in me is happy for I have but to type a single stroke or click a single click to do things that would have taken my pioneers 10s and maybe hundreds of man-hours. The pessimist in me is disappointed that I have walked into a mature industry with no scope of innovation. “Slaves of Tools”. This reminds me of one of my college seniors, who was a MVP (Microsoft Valued Professional) , write with contempt of his Linux slanted counter parts “why should I spend 100 hrs trying to debug a error most people wont even notice and  with the end result being 1 line of code added to 1000000s of lines already present?”. On the surface this is quite true but where is the sense of history there? The one line you add is going to sit itself to history with a line that Linus Toward or Saint INGUcius himself had written. Now isn’t that worth some, if not, lot of you time?

Some people had scared me coming into the industry, that I would be stuck to a tool, to a company, to a flow stuck so much that my carrier graph may get linked to the P/E graph of the company. Having just got out of college ,this was very distressing at first to be stuck to some thing. Bloody hell, part of the  reason I did not choose a software profession was not to be “JAVAised” or “MSised”. In hindsight it seems like a right decision take for the completely wrong reasons. I love being an electronic tool engineer. It helps me leverage on both of decent knowledge of electronics and good way with tools. For, as I found out, Innovation is a funny thing. An industry being mature does not mean that there are no more challenges. It just means that most of the lesser challenges have been sorted out and it’s up to you to figure out the hidden challenges and then solve them. So in a way it’s more challenging, cuz its up to you to identify the challenge, which in itself is a challenge. The only thing now missing for me in this industry is a proper sense of history I use proper since the habit of googling everything and anything that I encountered has led my temp cache to be filled with junk from all types of sites, during the course leading me to some history related sites. Since I need to justify the money that MindTree is paying me this search is going to be an ongoing process and I plan to publish the history in parts as and when I understand/ know about them and then later edit them to a complete document with flow….

And he said…..let there be light