( DAC 99 Item 15 ) ----------------------------------------------- [6/25/99]
HOISTED BY THEIR OWN PETARDS In a recent EE Times, Rajeev Madhavan, the
CEO of Magma, said "Technology comes from start-ups. Big companies aquire
the technology and lose the technologist." Rajeev ain't being brilliant
here; he's just saying what everyone in the industry knows. Take, for
example, the FPGA synthesis company Synplicity -- it was founded by Ken
McElvain who had just prior worked at Mentor Graphics. Synplicity now has
about 200 employees, an embarrassingly growing market share of the FPGA
synthesis business, and just announced 'Certify', a tool that does RTL
partitioning across multiple FPGAs (plus their synthesis tool) to make
ASIC prototyping trivial. ( http://www.synplicity.com ) Yet the e-mail I
received about Exemplar, the FPGA synthesis company bought by Mentor was:
"A [ Mentor ] Renoir developer told me they're being (or about to be)
re-deployed on other products. Renoir will be placed into maintenance
only mode. This is how it was told to me. Do I believe it? I did
express some incredulity at the time, but EDA is a funny business. Maybe
the bundling of MTI-Exemplar-Renoir is nothing more than a visit to the
Last Chance Saloon." ( http://www.renoir.com ) How different would this
have been if Ken McElvain had been rewarded to innovate while at Mentor?
"Adv Synth: Meropa, ( http://www.meropa.com ) a startup by the main
group of people who made the behavioral compiler. Looks promising.
Gets rid of a bunch of BC drawbacks. Also has a main synth engine,
that people who have tried it want to buy. I bet avanti buys em."
- Peet James of Qualis
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