I talked to Bob Smith recently about what's coming up in the world of the ESD Alliance now that it is part of SEMI.

One thing that Bob told me is that finally there are baby steps being taken outside of the US (Silicon Valley even) with a two-hour session at SEMICON China on design, which I attended. They are also looking at doing something in conjunction with SEMICON Europa in November.

Governing Council

One new thing is that the ESD Alliance has just had elections to what used to be called the board, but now the ESD Alliance is part of SEMI is called the Governing Council. Our new governing council members are (along with Bob himself):

• Aart de Geus, co-CEO of Synopsys
• Dean Drako, CEO IC Manage
• John Kibarian, CEO of PDF Solutions
• Wally Rhines, CEO Emeritus of Mentor
• Simon Segars, CEO of Arm
• Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Cadence
• Raik Brinkman, CEO of OneSpin Solutions
• Prakesh Narain, CEO of Real Intent
• Dave Dutton, CEO of Silvaco

CEO Outlook

The next event coming up is the CEO Outlook. This will be on May 23, starting at 6pm. There will be dinner, refreshments, and networking from 6:00pm to 7:00pm, and the outlook panel itself will be 7:00 to 8:30pm. And it's free! And open to anyone.

Bob told me that now the ESD Alliance is part of SEMI, he thought it should be a bit more focused on the whole chain from design through manufacturing. So rather than just the EDA CEOs, he reached out to CEOs in other parts of the value chain. So the participating CEOs are going to be:

• John Chong, VP of product and business development for Kionix, one of the world's largest suppliers of MEMS, and so a major supplier into the IoT market.
• Jack Harding, CEO of eSilicon. Jack told Bob they are doing a lot of 2.5D very high-performance designs. And I can confirm I saw their 112G SerDes running at the recent Linley conference.
• John Kibarian, CEO of PDF Solutions, who are focused on gathering data and doing semiconductor yield enhancement.
• Wally Rhines, CEO emeritus of Mentor. I guess if anyone deserves the phrase "needs no introduction", it is Wally.
• Ed Sperling of Semiconductor Engineering will moderate, as usual.

The event is expected to sell out (well, if sell out is the right word when it's free), so go and register.

ES Design West

Next, we talked about ES Design West, which is July 9 to 11 in San Francisco, in conjunction with SEMICON West. The program is now published. Obviously, since this is the first year that ES Design West has run, Bob says this is a bit of a trial run. There are still exhibitors signing up. It seems that even small companies are feeling that it is good to have a presence in the Silicon Valley area, as well as DAC in Las Vegas.

I'll just tell you about the keynotes:

• Tuesday: AI Design Forum, the Future of Computing. With Aart de Geus (CEO of Synopsys), Lisa Su (CEO of AMD), and Gary Dickerson (CEO of Applied Materials)
• Wednesday: Keynotes with author Bob Pearson, Dean Kamen (DEKA R&D, inventor of many things including the Segway), Jeffrey Wesler (VP of IBM Research in Almaden)

Jim Hogan's Heart of Technology event will be during ES Design West on Tuesday evening from 5:30pm to 10:00pm in the John Colins lounge. I'll write a blog post with more details nearer the time. Donations will go to the SEMI Foundation.

Wine and Music

I knew from about a decade ago that Bob has a second interest in the wine business. When I lived across the street from the San Francisco baseball park, Bob was selling his wines out of a store about a five-minute walk from my place on Bluxome Street. But he moved down to Dogpatch Wineworks, on 3rd Street next to Serpentine (great restaurant, by the way). But more importantly, he has opened a tasting room in Murphys on Highway 4 (the road to Bear Valley). Murphys has become a real wine destination, with 25 tasting rooms.

Partly because Bob's wine label is Jazz Cellars, they partnered with local musicians. So every Saturday and some Friday evenings during the summer they have live music. Check out the detailed program. In one of these weird coincidences, my daughter got married at the end of March about five miles away in the Avery Hotel, although as the father of the bride I was hardly able to slip away for a quick wine tasting! Not that we were short of something to drink, given that my daughter and half of her friends work in the alcohol industry.

And here's another coincidence. Bob recently had a hip replacement, and since he would be laid up for a couple of months, he took up the guitar again, something he had played a lot of in his middle-school days. One program he used to help him learn was Yousician. They are a Finnish company...but my son runs their customer acquisition team in New York.

Two observations Bob made are that up in the mountains there are a lot of tech people who go into winemaking, and also a lot of tech people are musicians.

Summary

CEO Outlook on May 23...with wine.

ES Design West July 9-11 and the HOT party...with wine.

Wine tasting...all summer long at 380 Main Street, Murphys, with music on Saturdays.

The most recent ESD Alliance event was an evening with Cadence's Paul Cunningham that I covered in ESD Alliance Evening with Paul Cunningham. Yes, there was wine.

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