New Media / New Tech

Over the holiday break, I came across an interview of Altium CIO Alan Perkins that caught my eye. Sramana Mitra has been focusing on interesting cloud-based businesses and this interview focused on how this EDA company was planning to move into the cloud. I wasn’t able to talk to Alan Perkins directly, but I was able to find out more through their folks in the US (the company is based in Australia). It was interesting enough to warrant a post. I knew very little about Altium before seeing this interview and maybe you don’t either, so here is a little background.

As most of you know, I’ve been a big advocate for using technology to do more and more online. As an example, back in April, when the volcano in Iceland was causing havoc with air travel in Europe, I wrote a post on the Xuropa blog entitled “What’s in Your Volcano Kit?” In that post, I urged EDA companies to develop a kit of online tools to communicate and collaborate with current and prospective customers and the industry in general. Well, it’s good to know that people are reading my blog and following my advice!

 (Part 3 in the series Which Direction For EDA: 2D,3D, or 360?) In the last blog post, I started to examine the question “is 2D scaling really dead or just mostly dead?” I looked at the most challenging issue for 2D scaling, lithography. But even if we can draw the device patterns somehow on the wafer at smaller and smaller geometries, does not necessarily mean that the circuits will deliver the performance (speed, area, power) improvements that Moore’s Law has delivered in the past.

Last year’s Design Automation Conference was kind of quiet and dull, muted by the impact of the global recession with low attendance and just not a lot of real interesting new developments. This year looks very different; I’m actually having to make some tough choices of what sessions to attend. And with all the recent acquisitions by Cadence and Synopsys, the landscape is changing all around, which will make for some interesting discussion. I’ll be at the conference Monday through Wednesday.