[interview] : Open source EDA software defeats Lock-in

Peggy Aycinena interviewed me on opensource EDA, which she published on edadesignline.

Open source EDA software defeats Lock-in—Dream on

Also this week, Ann Rein shared with us that her team is evaluating Fedora Electronic Lab at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico under 10 machines.

Filed under: eda, Free Electronic Lab, marketing

FEL: Product oriented and Marketing

Last week, I’ve got ill and that is still killing me. However, I meant an old friend Larry. At one point, Larry said “Everywhere you go people talk about innovation, but in the end if you really look deeper it is only mentioned by websites and marketing agents. The development team does not employed the word “innovation” in their daily sentences.”

Then, the discussion got into a serious tone where we were concluded that the word “innovation” is no longer attractive to us. We started thinking about how to present FEL efficiently. Fedora is an innovative technology and Fedora Project deserves the use of word “innovative” here. FEL is a subset of Fedora. So here is no actually meaning or advantage FEL will have if FEL mentioned “innovation” too. But only the other hand, if some people come to seek FEL without knowing Fedora on the first place how could that particular person know that we are the actual leader in opensource EDA deployment.

After those thoughts, Larry and I were shocked to hear us talking like this. It is not us. So what actually does FEL ? We provide a mature environment to rapidly implement, deliver and evolve the technology. While our users bet their success on EDA tools(under the FEL umbrella), our roles at Fedora become serious in order to keep our ecosystem healthy.

Just like, larger EDA companies need to focus on their sales pipelines for existing products and cost-control staff, FEL has to provide manpower for both maintenance of existing RPMs together with manpower to provide new set of EDA solutions to FEL community. So from a top level, view we are feeding the ecosystem and ecoculture with opensource tools and solutions.

Our goals during the F8 and F9 timeframe was to provide RTL-GDSII design flow for both analog and digital. We did it, but still we(FEL) are not satisfied yet, we could do much better. But time limits us.

During the F10 and F11 development cycles we were focussing on “technology-to-product” transition. The user should be able to make a hardware product out of FEL. Thus, we are bridging the real world and this puts on more pressure on our shoulders. It should be noted that technology-to-product transition is not only about package updates, but extending our existing supported design flows into a specific use model with a clear roadmap. Because we are “technology enthusiast”.

Filed under: Free Electronic Lab, marketing

click on this link, and the next, next finally outdated

While google remembers everything, some people keep on added links on their wiki pages to other pages which eventually points to another url. In the end, when someone finally finds the targeted page, that particular page

• is ugly
• contains outdated materials
• contains materials which is either irrelevant or does not reflect the goals of the initial page
• does not longer exist

There is nevertheless similarity: No one cares to think before creating a link as long as the material is reaching someone.

Tonight, I was reading some publications from National Instruments and Mentor Graphics. I was pleased to have well presented material exposed professionally. National Instruments’s publications had a lot of beautiful photos and Mentor Graphics’ had plain text with beautiful and simple flowcharts. It is not only pleasing to read, but also feels good to hand over those publications.

I’ve quickly gone through google to inspect some technical notes or application notes on opensource projects. I feel the “geek touch” which reading the publications. What is also horrible to my point of view there is no common layout/screenshots/structure on the publications with respect to the host project.

Filed under: marketing

Xuropa offers FEL free exhibition space

Fedora, since day one, has brought innovation in various ways to the opensource software ecosystem.

This week, we have opened an Online Booth at Xuropa to strengthen the opensource hardware design community.

Xuropa is a new company focussing on building an online EDA community around commercial and opensource EDA tools. With its platform, the community can evaluate different tools, give presentations about one’s EDA software and identify the most appropriate software for his/her design methodology.

Xuropa founder, James Colgan, offered us the Online Booth for free, meanwhile they setup the Online Lab. Xuropa and FEL both shared a common vision on strengthening EDA community in terms of marketing, trials, communication and networking. Though Xuropa was recently opened last september, I believe that, from a top-level point of view, the current EDA industry needs such infrastructure to build up a worldwide EDA community, rather than a community with big names only.

I invite you to visit our Online booth and promote opensource EDA software through this booth.

For some reason, FEL got lined up aside Cadence

Filed under: Free Electronic Lab, marketing, xuropa