I’ve taken the title for this blog entry from the name of a section in Paul McLellan’s new self-published book: EDA Graffiti. This phrase directly refers to one of the profound changes taking place in semiconductor design. In this section of the book, McLellan writes: “The 1990s were the decade of timing, when all [EDA] tools became timing driven with a completely synchronous design methodology. … The 2000s seem to be the decade of power, where the biggest headache is now meeting the power budget.” Now, if you had not read the entire 230 pages in the book preceding these statements, you might think that nothing else in IC design had changed.
But indeed, a lot has changed. The term SOC (system on chip) only came into common use around 1995. The phrase is used to differentiate an ASIC without an on-chip processor core from one with one or more processor cores, which are now called SOCs. There weren’t many SoCs before 1995 so we didn’t need to name such things. Fully 15 years later, you’d be hard-pressed to find any ASIC design underway that doesn’t have at least one on-chip processor. The norm is more like six or 10 processor cores per chip and some chips have more than 100 processors. Given this radical and rapid escalation in chip complexity, plus the death of Dennard scaling at 90nm—which has curbed the downward trend in per-transistor current consumption, it’s no wonder that power consumption and power dissipation have come to the fore as a chief source of grief for chip-design teams.
If you were to purchase this relatively inexpensive ($25) book from McLellan just for this section alone, it would probably be worth your time and money, but EDA Graffiti is much, much more valuable. It contains thick slices of well-cogitated observation and advice from someone who has self-admittedly spent more than three decades thinking about IC EDA and working in the EDA industry. McLellan was at VLSI Technology when the ASIC revolution started in the early 1980s. He became president of Compass Design Automation when it spun out of VLSI Technology. He’s been an executive manager at key EDA vendors including Cadence, Ambit, and VaST. And he was CEO for a year at Envis, a power-centric EDA vendor. McLellan’s longevity in the industry and his varied experiences in the EDA world give him more than enough street cred to carry off a gritty book like this. There is a ton of sharp, cogent information trapped within its covers for the inquisitive to find.
The book starts with an overview of the semiconductor industry. It pays homage to Moore’s Law, but it’s careful to explain what Moore’s Law really said (more transistors every generation) and what it did not say (faster transistors, lower power—things predicted by Dennard scaling). The book also covers semiconductor business economics in a way most technologists never consider. How many dollars per second do you need to capture in revenue to pay for a chip fab? You’d better know you’re going to make that kind of revenue and how many years that revenue will flow into your company before you drop a few billion dollars to build and equip the fab.
McLellan also delves deeply into EDA economics, marketing, and sales and his perspectives will help you to understand why EDA companies do what they do. As I now work in the EDA industry myself, this chapter on EDA is now heavily highlighted in my copy of the book. Nearly every sentence in this chapter on EDA contains deep insight, dearly won. The chapters on EDA marketing and engineering are similarly highlighted in my copy of the book. The chapter on Silicon Valley, not so much. That chapter contains McLellan’s personal assessments of immigration policy as it applies to high-tech and it contains other lifestyle odds and ends such as a profile of Cypress Semiconductor founder and CEO TJ Rodgers that will perhaps interest Silicon Valley insiders more than others.
The chapters include:
- Semiconductor industry
- EDA industry
- Silicon Valley
- Management
- Sales
- Marketing
- Presentations (as in PowerPoint)
- Engineering
- Investment and Venture Capital
McLellan’s EDA Graffiti book started as a long series of blog entries on the EDN Web site. He has taken these blog entries, expanded them, and added more material in the form of new sections. So even if you read the original blog entries, you’ll find more than enough new material in the book to make it worth the purchase.
The book is not without flaws. Most obviously, it’s not indexed so you’ll have to search for that perfect pithy sentence you remember reading, just as I’ve had to do so while writing this book review. In addition, the book clearly needs copy editing. There are misspellings; there are funny line breaks and strange paginations; and there are sentences that were clearly cut up during editing and then poorly respliced. However, these are really minor nits. You cannot help but ladle out generous portions of insight and knowledge about the IC and EDA industries wherever you dip into this book. Want perfect grammar? Buy a copy of Strunk and White.
If you want a copy of the book—and you should—you can order one at https://www.createspace.com/3452185. It’s also on Amazon.com, which always reports that the book is out of stock. That’s because McLellan self-published this book using the increasingly popular book-on-demand format. My copy was printed on May 13, 2010. (It says so on the back page.) Do not think that McLellan has taken this self-published route for lack of an interested publisher. Given the Internet, email, and 30+ years worth of deep industry connections, an experienced business man and marketer like McLellan can do far more with a book like this through direct marketing than can a traditional book publisher.
By the way, if you’ve got a CEO job in EDA that needs filling, or if you just want to tap into his experience, you’ll find McLellan at www.greenfolder.com. He’s just published a 273-page resume.
