Last month we offered a free PDF version of our book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry”, for the greater good. More than thirteen thousand people have downloaded it thus far so we would like to keep the momentum going with another book giveaway. Paul McLellan has graciously offered his book on EDA so here we go again:
SemiWiki Book Download:EDAgraffiti
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EDAgraffiti is 25 years of experience in the EDA and semiconductor industries wrapped up into a single book. From semiconductor to venture capital, via sales, marketing, engineering and management….
Foreword:
Paul has assembled an extraordinary number of opinion pieces in a relatively short period of time. I frankly find it amazing he can come up with that many ideas on the subject of EDA. I have maybe two or three ideas a year that are worth sharing with voices outside on my own head. Just amazing! Paul and I have been frequent collaborators. Our partnership starts soon after Paul joined Cadence via Ambit merger. At the time Cadence had recently lost Joe Costello as their CEO. As anyone who has heard Joe knows, Mr. Costello has a unique gift for spinning a vision and getting people to believe not only it was possible, but in fact it is actually already a reality. When Joe left Cadence, there was a huge void for all of EDA not just Cadence. Cadence had been through one of their acquisition cycles. The company was left with a collection of interesting products and solutions, but had difficulty welding the pieces into the cohesive whole.
Paul and I were tasked to bring that story to our investors, customer and employees. Fortunately for Cadence and myself, Paul pulled it together and it made sense. He and I each took a team and hit the road for a month to communicate the vision. I got to know and appreciate Paul’s unique gifts during this period.
I am proud to say I was smart enough to hang on to his coat tails then and plan to continue to. Over a decade has passed what I realize more than ever is that Paul has the brains, curiosity and willingness to take on complex subjects. He also has the unique ability to explain these ideas in terms and approach that are understandable by the maturity of the technical readership. I like to think of this as seeing the arc of story. How do you get everyone to your desired conclusion?
Great story tellers know this implicitly, Paul has this gift and you will see it demonstrated in the EDA Graffiti collection. Paul has done his best to offer his space to alternative views and express a balance in reporting his findings. Blogs by nature are the editorial pages of the present. The thing about an editorial piece is it is not fact but an opinion. I believe one of the issues on reliance on blogs for opinion is that in blogs there is often a lack of the journalistic integrity found in the printed press. However, you find a very balanced view in the collection.
Finally, with this collection I believe Paul is looking to move on to new challenges. Like I said earlier, I am going to make sure to hang on.
Enjoy the read,
Jim Hogan
Chapter 1: Semiconductor Industry – Explains all sorts of facets about the industry ranging from the costs involved in creating and running a fab, to various forms of IP like ARM, Atom, and PowerPC processors and cores, to what’s happening with the semiconductor industry in Japan.
Chapter 2: EDA Industry –Presents many interesting points of view, starting with why EDA (which is predominantly a software-based industry) has a hardware business model. Then bounces around looking at things like the corporate CAD cycle, Verilog and VHDL, Design for Manufacturing, ESL, the EDA press, and where EDA is going in the next ten years.
Chapter 3: Silicon Valley – Considers visas, green cards, China, India, Patents, and the Upturns and Downturns in the valley.
Chapter 4: Management – Being a CEO, hiring and firing in startups, emotional engineers, strategic errors, acquisitions, interview questions, managing your boss, how long should you stay in a job, and much more.
Chapter 5: Sales – Semi equipment and DDA, hunters and farmers, $2M per sales person, channel choices, channel costs for an EDA startup, application engineers, customer support, running a sales force, and much more.
Chapter 6: Marketing – Why Intel only needs one copy, the arrogance of ESL, standards and old standards, pricing, competing with free EDA software, don’t listen to your customers, swiffering new EDA tools, creating demand in EDA, licensed to bill, barriers to entry, the second mouse gets the cheese, and much more.
Chapter 7: Presentations – The art of presentations, presentations without bullets, all-purpose EDA keynote, finger in the nose, it’s like football only with bondage, and much more.
Chapter 8: Engineering – Where is all the open source software, why is EDA so buggy, internal deployment, groundhog day, power is the new timing, multicore, process variation, CDMA tales, SaaS for EDA, and much more.
Chapter 9: Investment and Venture Capital – Venture capital for your grandmother, crushing fixed costs, technology of SOX, FPGA software, Wall Street values, royalties, why are VCs so greedy, the anti-portfolio, CEO pay, early exits, and much more.
Also download: Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry
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Real men have fabs!