The Globalpress 2010 is being held at the Chaminade, on the hills overlooking Capitola and the Monterey Bay, April 25 - 29. There are 28 editors from Asia, 19 from Europe, and I am one of the 7 US editors attending. The event, organized by Irmgard Lafrentz, president of Globalpress, is sponsored, by my last count, by 29 companies who are looking to establish contact with professional editors. This diary will be updated daily, as the workshop unfolds.

I arrived at Chaminade a bit after noon. My room was not yet ready, but the restaurant offered a very nice brunch that I ate on a terrace overlooking the green hills facing the Pacific Ocean.

After brunch, while waiting for the room, I took a stroll around the property. It is quite large, and the setting makes it appropriate not only to professional workshops but also to mystical retreats. I found a short path in the woods, and even if I only had regular shoes on, I decided to follow it. The path was in good conditions, and in only a very few places I wished I had different shoes on.

It meandered among the oaks and the eucalyptus trees, with a few meadows to offer expansive vistas. I was told during brunch that it had rained the day before, and there were many flowers flanking the narrow path. At the other end of the trail a sign warned hikers that there had been reports of a mountain lion sighting. I did not see any, but then it was the middle of the day, and any self respecting wild beast would be resting in a cool place. Sandeep Vij, who in January became the company's CEO, gave a brief status report about his company. MIPS is targeting three market sectors, digital consumer products, networking, and portable communications, and aspires to become the dominant provider of CPU architecture in those segments. Its competitors are ARM and the Power PC consortium (IBM, Freescale, Apple). They have chosen Android, the Google operating system derived from Linux, because it is free and supported by the marketing power house that is Google. Mr. Vij is very bullish about MIPS opportunities in the ner future.

The dinner featured fish dishes, including lobster, shrimp, and oysters with superb accompaniments. The editors had the opportunity to relax, get to know each other, and talk to both MIPS representatives and the Globalpress staff.

Monday April 26th

The day started quite early for Silicon Valley standard: 7:45 am. Actually it was earlier than that, if you wanted some breakfast before the beginning of the workshop. Altera was first on the agenda. Danny Biran, Senior VP of Marketing, described the introduction of a new family of products: Stratix V. He covered in some details one of the aspects of the new device: the DSP capabilities that offer a total portfolio of solutions for a number of markets.

Silogo was up next. I had never heard of the company before but quickly came to the conclusionthat the company name must stand for Silicon Lego since a number of the products are FPGA based devices that allow a PCB designer to replace a significant amount of discreet components with one device to save both area and power. The company has other products, but GreenPack and GreenSack where the products that really captured my attention.

Lattice Semiconductor was the next presenter. The company business model targets the medium and lower segment of the FPGA market. It avoids competing directly with Altera and Xilinx. Its devices target both video and communication applications. The company is profitable but I think that its indirect sales channel is not as efficient as it could be.

The next presentation was from Quicklogic. They have a very interesting business model that makes them partners in the design development, and production of a customer's device. This is a model that can be explored by other EDA vendors, even if Quicklogic is NOT and EDA vendor, but instead a fabless semiconductor company. The business model is based on Quicklogic becoming involved in the development of the product at the architectural level, that is, very early in the process. Thus their "time to money" can vary from 12 to 18 months. But a successful project return on investment is much higher than what an EDA vendor can realize through licensing.

Their presentation was followed by a panel discussion on Green Energy. It is clear to me that the only possible avenue to a sustainable green energy industry is a higher cost of traditional energy sources. From a technology point of view we have many choices and attractive solutions, but almost all of them are at this point more costly than traditional sources like coal and petroleum. Government subsidies are not the answer, especially when governments, like the state of Florida, are in financial distress and renege on rebates.

After lunch, again a pleasant experience served buffet style, we listened to a keynote speech by Mike Polacek, Sr. Vice President, Market Segments and Business Development form National Semicondutor. His theme was that energy efficiency rests on three directions: Generation, Conservation, and Storage. Unfortunately we, both as an industry and as a species, are far from having good solutions to any of the three issues. There is progress, for sure, but we have not yet reached critical mass.

The last presentation of the day was from Global Unichip, a fables semiconductor company that is 35.5% owned by TSMC. I was surprised to find out that the majority of their revenue is generated from the US market, while their revenue from Europe is quite minimal. Of course its Chinese market is growing, but, may be for political reasons, not as fast as one might expect.

Tonight dinner was only fair, as the evening major focus was mock gambling, may be to satisfy the Asian editors. Non-the -less it was a good opportunity for networking and for me in particular to spend some time with one of my preferred PR person: Mike Sottack, of Wired Island.

Another full day of meetings awaits!

Tuesday April 27th

Every once in a while something happens to remind me how little I really know. This morning the first presentation was from Gennum, a Canadian company that serve the broadcasting industry. Dr. Martin Rofheart gave a technical presentation that was well beyond my level of competence. It was quite interesting for a few of my colleagues who cover the broadcasting industry; all I got out of it is that HD is challenging, 3D TV much more challenging, and that the cabling is a weak point in the system.

This` was followed by a panel "MEMS is Hot" moderated by Stephan Ohr. Panelists included Eric Eisenhut from Kionix, Mark Martin from Analog Devices, Jack Blaha from AppliedMaterials, Frank Melzer from Bosch Sensortec, and Mike Jamiolkowski from Conventor. The panel was very interesting. I think MEMS are the next application area and market segment for EDA expansion. The fabrication challenges are significant, but the design and system integration are even more challenging. Both Kionix and Conventor have software tools that help in MEMS design. Conventor, in fact has integrated their development tools with both Cadence and Mathworks.

David Bell, President and CEO of Intersil conclude the morning presentations. His talk, as it has to be expected coming from the chief executive dealt mostly about the financial aspects of the semiconductor industry and Intersil in particular. The near future is bright, with a reasonable recovery this year and a strong 2011 forecasted.

Tanner EDA opened the afternoon presentation. The world is analog, and certainly the opportunities for analog EDA tools are significant. Greg Lebsack, its President introduced the company, the technology and the opportunities he sees for his company.

The last presentation of the day introduced the editors to Open Silicon, a design services provider company that has its roots in Intel. Naveed Sherwani, President and CEO, was not only instructive but also entertaining while he explained the capabilities of Open Silicon and its place in the market.

Wednesday April 28th

This morning we had one extra hour for breakfast, since the first scheduled presentation did not start until 9:00 AM. I learned new information from Peregrine Semiconductor about Silicon On Sapphire, or SOS and the comparison between this process and Silicon On Isolator, or SOI when it comes to building RF circuits. The data presented showed without any doubt that SOS delivers better and more reliable performance when used in manufacturing and integrating devices used in the communication market.

Apache Design Solution was the next presenter. Andrew Yang, its CEO reinforced with facts the notion that Apache is the leading EDA vendor in the area of power analysis and noise avoidance. A bit of arithmetic using presented data allows one to guess that Apache's 2009 revenue were around $200 million, and even allowing for errors due to approximations contained in the data, the company earned above $150 million.

EVE and Magma did not make formal presentations. Instead they had scheduled one-on-one sessions with various editors.

In the afternoon Dr. Bernard Meyerson delivered the keynote speech. Focusing on IBM's Smart Planet projects, Dr. Meyerson identified problems generated by the raw collection of available data and showed how stream computing and cloud computing can be used to solve difficult problems, including EDA tools throughput relative to the wall clock.

Mentor Graphics closed the agenda with a presentation whose subject is still under embargo, but that is certainly timely in our industry. You will just have to wait a few more days before reading about it in these pages.

In the evening I skipped dinner with the group to meet with Peggy to discuss our new service: EDAMarket. After just three weeks, the service is doing fine, its membership is growing, and we have been able to produce significant new content. Yet, there is still much to be done, many decisions still to be taken. We met in Scotts Valley because Peggy thought that the Globalpress event was being held in Monterey and thus the location would have been half way between her house and where I was staying. What a surprise, when all I had to do was drive only a little over seven miles to meet her!