Global teams support innovation

Innovation is necessary but not sufficient to support a national economy. That’s a point I emphasized in a post earlier this week, in which I noted that the US cannot be successful selling innovation and buying the products of that innovation. And furthermore, it’s not as if the US has a monopoly on innovation.That point is clear from recent interviews with engineers at US-based companies who produced significant innovations last year.

Speaking about the development of Synopsys’s DesignWare SuperSpeed USB 3.0 IP, Robert Lefferts, R&D director, says the effort required cooperation among designers dispersed among seven locations in the US, Canada, India, and Armenia. Similarly, the development of Xilinx’s Virtex-6/Spartan-6 FPGA required the efforts of 250 software, silicon, IP, and system engineers around the world.

The Synopsys and Xilinx engineering teams are two of five finalists for EDN’s Innovator of the Year award. You can read more about all five teams in EDN’s March 4 print edition or online:

–the Intrinsity Cortex-A8 FastCore team,

–the MontaVista Software Real-Fast Linux team,

–the Numonyx Alverstone Phase-Change-Memory team,

–the Synopsys DesignWare SuperSpeed USB 3.0 IP team, and

–the Xilinx Virtex-6/Spartan 6 team.

Then visit www.edn.com/innovation and vote for your favorite team, if you haven’t already.

P.S. In my post from Tuesday I cite former IBM VP Ralph Gomory as calling for a realignment of national and corporate interests in the US “consistent with our history and with the limited capabilities of our government.” The realignment would create jobs in the US for those who will never become potential innovators of the year. One commenter said that Gomory is being hypocritical, since IBM has laid people off and transferred jobs overseas. But it’s not hypocritical to play by the rules as they exist while advocating for changes to those rules.

See my related commentary “In a jobless recovery, innovators will have jobs” and follow me on Twitter.