EDAC Becomes...You Have to Be There to Be the First to Know

When Bob Smith took over as the Executive Director of EDAC, I called him up and one of the things that we discussed was broadening its scope. There were two ways in which EDAC is very narrowly focused, one is geographical and one is EDA-centricity. It is hard to see what an Indian IP company would get out of EDAC membership, for example, let alone an embedded software company. But, increasingly, software, boards, packages, IP, and even libraries are all designed a lot more holistically than in the past, to what at Cadence we call System Design Enablement (SDE), and EDAC needs to change to reflect that reality. System companies design their own chips, semiconductor companies create entire software stacks.

I pointed out that EDAC seems to be very Silicon-Valley-centric, especially when you compare it to, say, SEMI or GSA, which have events all over the world. He agreed:

After all, if you look at a heat map of where semiconductor design is done, then China lights up bright, and Vietnam seems to be where India was maybe 20 years ago. Taiwan, and to a lesser extent Korea, is the center of the fabless ecosystem. And there is still lots going on in Japan even if the number of companies has reduced significantly through mergers. But EDAC never calls.

Bob told me that he thinks even the name EDAC is no longer representative of its membership, which now includes IP companies, including ARM, the largest. Of course some EDA companies, such as Cadence, are IP companies, too, although they are already members with their EDA hats on.

Bob continued:

The challenge going forward is to ensure that EDAC delivers value to its members and, ideally, finds a way to broaden its reach to deliver value to companies that are not currently members but that are first-class-citizens in the semiconductor design ecosystem. EDAC has the tagline "where electronics begins" but there are a lot more than silicon-valley EDA companies involved.

But the old order changeth yielding place to new.

Thus, at the end of this month, on March 30, EDAC announces:

• A new name
• A new logo (well, obvioiusly)
• A new mission

Not only that, there is cheese, wine, and a craft-beer tasting. The event will take place at EDAC's headquarters (in the SEMI building) at 3081 Zanker Road, San Jose, CA 95134 (on the corner of Zanker and Montague Expressway) from 6:30pm to 8:30pm. Come along to the launch party and be the first to hear the news.

The event is free but space is limited and you need to pre-register.