Cadence on the Beat Blogs

There’s a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one…—Malvina Reynolds

In the cubicle environment, one often overhears conversation. I usually tune out conversation that is irrelevant to me, but sometimes random words or phrases break through my bubble. Yesterday some co-workers referenced the Malvina Reynolds song, Little Boxes, written back in 1962. It was part of my childhood soundtrack, so my ears perked up as my co-workers discussed the song. (Go ahead and listen to it. It’s short!)

According to Wikipedia,

The song is a political satire about the development of suburbia and associated conformist middle-class attitudes. It mocks suburban tract housing as “little boxes” of different colors “all made out of ticky-tacky”, and which “all look just the same.”

This is not a political or social commentary blog, and I’m not talking about conformist attitudes here. What jumped out at me while I was thinking about this blog was the concept of creativity.

The “little boxes” of suburban housing may look all the same, but everyone puts their own touch of the individual in them: there’s a green one, and a pink one, and a blue one, and a yellow one. Each is painted differently, each one is decorated according to the occupant’s tastes. Everyone yearns to put their own touches on their living space, no matter how much they may look the same.

(I’m also reminded of another childhood story, The Big Orange Splot, by Daniel Pinkwater. Be sure to share it with your favorite kid!)

What does this have to do with Cadence?  Well, there is a lot of creativity involved in what we do as individuals, whether it’s accounting or marketing or coding or engineering or architecting chips or boards or systems. We all have ways of expressing that creativity in our problem-solving, each of us drawing on what we have learned—in this case, even back when I was five years old—putting our own touches on the finished product. For Cadence as a company, there is such creativity in force when we all come together as creative individuals to create products that creatively meet the needs of our customers.

Where EDA Happens

As I wrote in a blog post a couple of weeks ago, there is some worry in the world about automation taking work away from people. With artificially intelligent robots performing the duties of line workers, what’s the worker to do? This worry is just as valid in the engineering realm as it is for those working on a factory floor. In the field of electronic design automation (EDA), with the tools that Cadence has developed, where does the chip engineer’s job lie?

Here’s the thing, though. Chips (and boards and systems) have become so much more complicated in the years since EDA tools have become ubiquitous. The need for engineers has only grown since then; in fact, there is a shortage of computer science engineers in the field. Automation, in this case, has only caused the demand for engineers to grow, not wane.

Where EDA Happens

Moore’s Law has been a reliable guide for the increase in complexity of chips, and the resource of engineers to design them has not kept up with that trajectory, hence the need for more automation tools. If automation were the problem, we would have a glut of engineers now.

My point, though, is this—there is and will continue to be jobs in this new world that we can’t even imagine yet. There may be growing pains, but growth is and will continue to be a constant. Even if there is an automated system to do work that used to be done by hand, there is and will continue to be a need for creativity to be applied to what still needs to be done.

So go make your creative mark on your work, your neighborhood, and the world—and paint your house a new color!

—Meera