!!! "It's not a BUG, 
/o o\ / it's a FEATURE!" (508) 429-4357
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\ - / INDUSTRY GADFLY: "In Memory of Richard Newton (1951-2007)"
_] [_
by John Cooley
Holliston Poor Farm, P.O. Box 6222, Holliston, MA 01746-6222
I remember when I first heard of Richard Newton. Or should I say, saw the
name "Prof. Richard Newton". He had sent me a letter; not an email, but a
real paper-in-an-envelope-and-all letter which he had sent hand addressed to
me at my post office box. And the envelope had $15 in it!
I laughed. You see, earlier that year at DAC 1995, the then CEO of Cadence
had said publicly on stage:
"We're stuck in a fixed-pie model. Have you seen three big dogs
hovering over one bowl of dog food? It's not a pretty picture."
- Joe Costello, DAC 95 CEO Panel
And in reply on that same stage from the Synopsys CEO came:
"If you think of yourself as a dog, you deserve dog food!"
- Aart de Geus, DAC 95 CEO Panel
So since I was scheduled to give a keynote address a few months later at the
1995 International Cadence Usergroup (ICU), I thought it would be a hell of a
lot of fun to do a Dog Food Drive For Joe:
Mail your cans of dog food to "P.O. Box 6222, Holliston, MA 01746-6222"
or print this, mark how much & what you want bought with a check to pay
for it and I'll personally buy & deliver it to Cadence Chelmsford in
August. (I believe a good joke is worth the hassle!)
CANNED DOG FOOD: DRY DOG FOOD:
__ Alpo "Chunky Lamb" $2.00/3 Cans __ Purina Dog Chow $6.00/10 lb bag
__ Mighty Dog "Chicken" $3.00/5 Cans __ Kibbles'N Bits $11.00/20 lb bag
__ generic horsemeat $2.00/5 Cans __ generic beef $7.00/25 lb bag
__ Ken-L Ration "Beef" $1.00/3 Cans __ Gravy Train $9.00/20 lb bag
__ Skippy "Smoky Beef" $1.00/2 Cans __ Pedigree "Lamb" $12.00/22 lb bag
Clearly hand print how you want to be listed on Joe's "BON APPETIT!" card:
NAME (or "Anonymous"):___________________________________
COMPANY (or "Anonymous"):___________________________________
All money will be to buy dog food; what Cadence Chelmsford doesn't take
will be donated to the Framingham Humane Society. :^)
- John Cooley, the ESNUG guy
from http://www.deepchip.com/posts/0221.html
And Richard Newton, or should I say the "Dr. Richard Newton" of the highly
respected University of California at Berkeley Electrical Engineering Dept
was one of the first people to contribute. That $15 was for 9 cans of
Ken-L Ration "Beef" and a 20 lb bag of Kibbles'N Bits to give to Joe.
On the form, Newton had requested to be anonymous and I didn't know him, so
it wasn't until years later I learned this guy was the academic Godfather
of All EDA. Newton was a behind-the-scenes bigwig who helped found both
Cadence and later Synopsys. Whoa!
But at the time I didn't know any of this. So to me, he was just yet another
unknown EDA professor but one with a sense of humor. It wasn't until a year
later at DAC 1996 that I got to meet him one-on-one; when Newton introduced
himself. I remembered his exact words:
"I never pick a fight with someone who buys electrons by the Coulomb."
- Richard Newton at DAC 1996
It was his twist on the Mark Twain quote of never picking a fight with a man
who buys ink by the barrel. Newton remembered how much fun I had on the web
crucifying Ron Collett for his oh-so-wrong VHDL-will-take-over-the-world
predictions. But Newton wanted to be able to bounce his EDA ideas off me and
vice versa; in a safe setting. So we hit upon a gentleman's agreement -- I'd
never publically criticize his forming ideas *with his name on them* unless
it was something he had already *publically* said. It was still OK for me to
trash any of his half-baked ideas; just not with his name on them. But any
of his fully formed ideas which he had presented for public consumption were
still fair game, though.
Little did I know that this agreement would lead over the years to some truly
interesting discussions which I now wished I had written down. The dot com
EDA brain drain, Avanti, Windows NT vs. UNIX, the Verisity IPO, Speedsim,
Redwood's flop, ViewLogic, Chronologic, Java everywhere, PrimeTime, layout
schemes, reusable IP, crosstalk, Verplex, emulators, SPICE, Cadence Spectrum
consulting, Forte, web based design, why most Americans don't get advanced
engineering degrees, and of course, synthesis.
The man was brilliant yet as an engineer I had a lot of fun privately poking
holes in some of his more impractical visions. On the flip side, Newton also
helped keep me from making a total fool of myself before I published some of
my own uber stupid "insights", too.
I remember early on Newton was advocating a sort of Kumbaya pipedream where
all the EDA vendors would voluntarily move their tools off their own internal
proprietary databases and onto one universally accepted open database. I
thought this was unrealistic because no vendor would ever want to give up his
home database advantage. "I'm sure all the EDA vendors would just loooooove
leveling that playing field. Wouldn't you? Heck, Joe only opened up Verilog
*only* after it looked like the EDA world was actually going to standardize
on VHDL!" was my counter argument to him at the time. And since Newton had
founder's shares in half of the known big EDA companies, I then jokingly
accused him of being a Wall Street Communist. Afterwards when I'd see him
I'd sometimes greet him with: "How goes the revolution, Comrade?"
Years later when Newton floated his computing-for-rural-villages-in-India
plan, my first response was: "This isn't one of those crazy People's Republic
of Berkeley ideas is it? I hope you're not taking this Wall Street Commie
role too seriously now... Are you?" (He laughed.)
God, I'm going to miss those conversations.
-----
John Cooley runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG), is
a contract ASIC designer, and loves hearing from engineers at
or (508) 429-4357.
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