( ESNUG 510 Item 5 ) -------------------------------------------- [10/22/12]
From: John Cooley <jcooley=user domain=zeroskew not mom>
Subject: In Memory of Ivan Pesic of Silvaco (1951 - 2012)
Hi, DeepChip readers,
It's my sad duty to inform you that Ivan Pesic of Silvaco died of cancer two
days ago in Japan. His wife, 1 son, and 1 daughter survive him. Ivan was
born in Resnik, Montenegro on Sept 13, 1951.
 
Back in 2005 before I went to meet Ivan for the first time, Richard Goering
(then of EE Times) had warned me about writing anything about him. "Watch
out! He sues people! And he wins!"
I'll be honest, at first, Goering's warning scared me. "Who wants to be
around any #$%&-$#%@ who constantly threatens to sue you? Why waste time
with losers like that???"
What Goering forgot to mention was that Ivan only sued people and companies
that he knew who were stealing his SW code and his trade secrets.
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And that Ivan was a NO BULLSHIT kind of man, too!
After he had won his suit against Circuit Semantics, Inc., and later found
out that they were still using his code, Ivan told EE Times in 2006:
"The code they did turn over clearly demonstrated they stole my
entire SmartSpice; about 800,000 lines of code. They built their
entire company on it."
Then he reopened his lawsuit against Circuit Semantics -- and then at $5,000
a license -- $144 million -- he fearlessly sued 10 of Circuit Semantics' big
name customers -- many of which had monster Legal Department like Intel, AMD,
Agilent, Cypress, Cirrus, AMCC, Tvia, Tau Networks, NetLogic, Specular
Networks -- and won millions!
And when Aart's lawyers shocked everyone back in 2005 by threatening to sue
all the Magma customers for patent infringements, Ivan wrote in a letter
to DeepChip saying SNPS could do this:
"... with patents, Synopsys has an advantage because recovery of
damages in patent infringement cases can be done over the 17 year
life of the patent. This means Magma customers will have a 17 year
window to worry about, if Synopsys wins this lawsuit."
- from http://www.deepchip.com/gadfly/gad050505.html
Ivan even sued Avanti about some stuff MetaSoft did, and got $26 million
from Aart after Aart had bought Avanti.
Wow! This guy doesn't ever stop!
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As you can guess, Ivan was one of those hard charging men who you either
"clicked" with or hated. Coming from a hard scrabble background where he
ran an auto body repair shop for 5 years to get enough money to start his
real business, Silvaco, back in 1984, Ivan was known for his strong dislike
of bankers and venture capitalists. (And since I worked as a mechanic in
the Army to pay for my college BSEE degree, Ivan and I got along nicely.)
As big supplier of SPICE and TCAD in Asia, Ivan's dislike of bankers and
debt caused him to always run Silvaco very conservatively.
For Silvaco tool users, this means not too worry. I haven't met Ivan's son
(who will succeed him at Silvaco) but knowing Ivan's old school mindset I'm
sure Ivan raised him to be someone strong whom he's given a very detailed
multi-year business plan to follow.
I know this because when we first met in 2005, I asked Ivan how he got his
son, who had said at the time that he wanted to be a garage mechanic, to
change into being a motivated college student. "I took him to one of the
roughest auto shops in San Jose. I had him sit in the car across the street
and watch what a mechanic did for one full day's work," smiled Ivan. "After
that he was an A student in school."
Considering all the Hell that Ivan personally went through to start and keep
his Silvaco going, there's no way he'd let it disappear after he's gone.
Ivan was that kind of guy.
- John Cooley
DeepChip.com Holliston, MA
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