Differentiation is key to EDA
Rajeev Madhavan of Magma Design Automation discusses the evolving EDA business, the economy, and the state of the semiconductor industry.
By Rick Nelson, Editor in Chief -- Test & Measurement World, 2/2/2009 1:07:00 PM
The evolving EDA business, the depressed economy, the state of the semiconductor industry, and the future of education in the US were all on the mind of Rajeev Madhavan, chairman and CEO of Magma Design Automation, when we spoke recently.
What’s your impression of the state of the industry?
The semiconductor industry in the last few quarters has been in a really bad situation. October and November were the worst months I have ever seen in my life. Customers were just were frozen up, with deer-in-the-headlight syndrome. They just froze all purchase orders. People deploying new technology just stopped halfway through their projects.
What’s going to happen next?
I think people were shell-shocked given what the implications were of the two bad quarters. But now some companies are doing some analysis to determine what they are to become. I think a lot of transition is happening in our customer community.
Could you elaborate?
Companies are asking what things are optional—what things that aren’t really important? TI, for example, even wanted to sell some of its wireless business and has moved more and more into analog and mixed signal. [Texas Instruments announced on Jan 27, 2009, that it would not sell its merchant broadband business because it could not get the price it wanted (see "TI cuts 3400 jobs, no longer plans to sell merchant baseband biz").] Right now, semiconductor companies are shedding what they think is bad for them, and many are moving away from large digital SOCs (systems on chips) and toward mixed signal. [Read the complete interview, "Voices: Magma Design Automation’s Rajeev Madhavan," on theEDNWebsite.]
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