Once upon a time, Silicon Valley was all about the technology. You developed a skill at something and then applied it to anything that would give you an edge over someone else.

So, for instance, if you’re a company like Wolfson, with a knack for developing analog front-ends for consumer items, then you might do a wide range of them for things like, oh, imaging, audio, etc.

They call that “horizontal” marketing.

But that fell out of favor. Maybe engineers got too busy. Maybe someone had a marketing book … Read More → "Vertical or Horizontal?"

Reading Jim Turley’s article about business models got me thinking about FPGA and EDA companies.  

Yeah, I know. What’s new?

We’ve talked a lot about how EDA companies struggle to find a business model that earns them their fair share of the loot that comes from electronics.  The full-fledged, modern EDA industry has been around for about three decades and… they still drive a huge portion of the technology while reaping a tiny fraction of the rewards.

The fundamental reason for this, I believe, is that they’ … Read More → "Selling What?"

The other day Mixel announced a MIPI Alliance ecosystem partnership. So… is that a branch of the MIPI Alliance? A new MIPI Alliance? I was a bit confused. (Not an infrequent state of mind for me, but never mind…)

This gets to some of the subtleties of industry partnerships. If you’re not careful, you can run afoul of anti-trust collusion laws. These laws were put in place because, in the olden days, big companies would get together and divide up territories and agree on pricing and basically guarantee that they would all get … Read More → "An Alliance of Alliance Members"

Yesterday I went to Mentor’s U2U user event. Something was missing – and it was a good thing.

We editors probably go to more events than your average engineer, but even an engineer that goes to a couple per year  must end up with a basement full of black ballistic nylon bags of various shapes and sizes with logos that ensure that his or her kids will never want to be seen in public with them. We may like the technology behind the logos, but they’re not considered “cool brands.& … Read More → "A Simple Brown Paper Bag"

Yesterday Cadence announced a major update to their Allegro PCB design suite. This is the full-featured set of tools targeted at enterprise (= deep pockets) customers. They found that their offering had outgrown the “good/better/best” grading that had been in place for a long time.

What they’ve done instead is to put in place a baseline tool, Allegro PCB Designer, into which various optional modules can be inserted. These modules provide various higher-value functions, and the licenses can be purchased in quantities different from those purchased for the base product. For example, … Read More → "New PCB Design Mix ‘n’ Match"

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. This week we’ve been talking about the promise of the cloud for EDA, and indeed, there is much promise.

And yet, today we get a reminder of the flip-side: some of Amazon’s services went down for a while. Customers may not experience these as Amazon outages, but rather as Foursquare or Reddit – or … Read More → "Some days are cloud-free"