At first I thought it was a typo.  The International Engineering Consortium
(IEC) had just awarded its 2009 "DesignVision" award in the category of
"Design Verification Tools" to Sequence's PowerArtist?????  What the huh???

(The IEC are the people who bring you DesignCon.)

OK, so Mentor's Sierra Olympus won in the IEC's "IC Design Tools" category.
That makes sense.  Olympus is an P&R tool.  But PowerArtist is also a DESIGN
tool, too!  (That is, my "huh" comes from it's NOT a VERIFICATION tool; yet
it won in the verification category???)

To double check, I went to the Sequence web site and looked up PowerArtist.
There it was: 

   "Depending on the reduction technique, PowerArtist can automatically
    rewrite power-optimized RTL, output synthesis constraints, or guide
    the user through manual RTL rewrite.  The wide range of visual debug
    diagnostics in PowerArtist significantly lower the barrier for the
    RTL designer in creating low power RTL."

Yup, PowerArtist is still an RTL-level power reduction tool; a design tool.

I call up Vic Kulkarni, CEO of Sequence, and asked him what was going on.
"To tell you the truth, John, we were as surprized as you are.  We put in
the paperwork for PowerArtist and then forgot about it," said Vic.  "We
didn't lobby anyone anywhere for it to win."

I asked Vic if knew who any of the IEC Award judges were.  He had no idea.
I snooped around the IEC and DesignCon web pages and they gave no hint of
who the judges might be.  That was on Friday.

I called Vic again on Tuesday.  "I still have no idea who the IEC judges
were.  They're being very secretive about it.  We're still very happy we
won.  We don't exactly know why, but we're happy about it."

Vic reminds me of the old Irish Rover song where the punch line was: "Lad,
I don't know where you've been, but I see you've won first prize!"

    - John Cooley
      DeepChip.com