A hilarious end to the IEF2007 conference in Athens came with a dust-up between Rahul Sud the designer if the legendary Inmos IMS1400 16K NMOS SRAM and founder and CEO of Lattice Semiconductor and Wally Rhines, CEO of Mentor Graphics.
Sud and Rhines were both on the final panel and Sud proclaimed that EDA tools are far too expensive and that, if they were cheaper, they would result in flourishing of design talent across the world even in such remote places as Siberia resulting in many good economic consequences such as a rise in the birth-rate.
Rhines, natually retorted that the tools were very expensive to develop, the their cost represented only a small proportion of companies' design budgets, and that "none of us is getting rich doing this stuff."
Sud thought that it would be doing the world a favour if someone bought up one of the EDA companies and made all their tools open source.
Rhines, an old buddy, of Sud, took him to task on what would be a disatrous course for the industry.
Then it turned out from one of the Russian delegates that Vladimir Putin is putting some of his massive oil revenues into 60 design centres in Russia for which all the licence fees for EDA tools will be paid by the government.
In a tender contest between Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor for the contract, Cadence won.
Good news for Siberian babies.
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