It may have been Gabe Moretti’s career foray into the newspaper business as a college student that piqued a long-held interest in reporting and analysis. For when an opportunity arose to chronicle the EDA and semiconductor industries for EDN Magazine in 1999, he couldn’t resist the chance to get his fingertips stained with ink.
Let’s begin Gabe’s story in 1966 with IBM, but first, a few particulars. Born in Turin, Italy, during World War II, Gabe came to the United States as an exchange student in 1960, spending 11 months in Torrance, Calif. Back in Italy, he worked for the American consulate in Turin after graduating from high school. In 1964, he returned to the U.S. with a full scholarship to the California Institute of Technology, otherwise known as CalTech.

In 1966, IBM introduced the IBM 360 and it wasn’t selling as well as expected. Customers were resisting the upgrade because there were few experienced programmers who knew this new machine. IBM’s solution was to train college students. Before the five-week course began, each student needed to pass an exam to qualify for training. Thirty-five qualified, but at the end of the course only three where placed by IBM, including Gabe. Incidentally, after several months, only Gabe remained employed.

One customer who invested in the IBM 360 was the storied Los Angeles Times, owned at that time by the Chandler family, descendents of newspaper baron Otis Chandler. Gabe joined the paper in its prime –– it won four Pulitzer Prizes, the excellence in journalism award, in the 1960s.

Meanwhile, Gabe determined that the CalTech PhD program required too many years in school, so he left and enrolled at Whittier College on a scholarship. While Whittier is a fine school, it’s not as rigorous or demanding as CalTech, allowing him to work for the LA Times as a part-time computer programmer from 1966-68.
“The Times was a big and successful organization,” he remarks, as he describes his work environment in a big computer room, the likes of which no one in this day and age could imagine.

And while many of the industry know Gabe through his editorial work, his training and experience is far more varied and here’s where the story gets interesting.
Graduating from Whittier College with a degree in business administration and loads of hands-on experience as a computer programmer, he took a job at TRW Systems. He worked in the Microelectronics Lab and learned all about semiconductors. “I wrote my first CAD program at TRW,” he remarks, adding that CAD was the term for EDA in those days. EDA, or Electronic Design Automation, wasn’t coined until the early 1980s by some clever marketers at Mentor Graphics.

TRW was a defense electronics contractor and Gabe, on a student visa, had no clearance. The code he developed was unclassified at the time (it would be reclassified SECRET later on), but the data was classified, which meant that he never knew what his team was working on until many years later. He continues, “We played 20 questions. Someone would read the output from my programs and tell me what it looked like. I would try to fix the problem. I got pretty good at it, too.”

Somehow, they made it work until the Microelectronics Lab moved into a new, top-secret building, where everything was classified. Gabe, still on a student visa, worked for six months from a rented office by the LA airport with a desk, chair, remote card reader and teletype machine. He knew that this arrangement would not work forever because it was costing TRW too much money.

The answer came in 1969 when some engineers from the TRW Microelectronics Lab started a new company that produced a programmable calculator to compete with the newly introduced HP calculator. Gabe consulted at first, then went full time as a CAD programmer while earning a master’s degree in computer science from UCLA.

An offer to join Intel in 1976 brought Gabe to Silicon Valley and that’s when he first became aware of the Design Automation Conference. He attended his first DAC in 1977.

Gabe worked in the Microprocessor Division in Santa Clara, Calif., and started out developing hard disk systems for the 8080 development system and was later involved in supporting the 8086. Those were the days when all of the microprocessor companies had CAD departments, and big ones at that, building open element systems, including compilers and testers.

An Intel boss joined Signetix in Sunnyvale, Calif., in 1978 and recruited Gabe to run the central CAD group and serve as a liaison to Philips Research Labs, all before Philips got out of the business. This was right around the time that Daisy came into existence. “I saw the industry from the beginning in the early 1980s,” he notes.

Next, Chancellor Computer Corporation, developer of a schematic editor for the IBM PC, came calling in late 1982 or early 1983. Looking back, Gabe says it was founded by two people with no real interest in CAD or EDA, but an eye for a quick return on investment. “As the economic fortunes dwindled, I served as vice president of engineering and vice president of marketing.” The company went bankrupt shortly after he left.

At that point in his career, Gabe was ready to do his own thing. He became a consultant and founded Engineering Information Systems (EIS). Gabe laughing says that he “was in the IP business without knowing it” because he developed models for the most popular proprietary logic simulators of the day, including Daisy, Vantage, HHB Systems and Quickturn.

He ran his business for six years, until 1992, when Intergraph acquired the remnants of Daisy –– or Dazix, the merger of Daisy and Cadentix –– and needed help. Gabe was hired to help run the Daisy/Cadnetix development group in Sunnyvale. In 1993, Chuck Robertson was hired by Intergraph to manage the EDA Division and shortly thereafter Veribest was born as a wholly owned subsidiary. Gabe joined the executive management team in Boulder, Colo., and became vice president of engineering, responsible for teams in Mountain View, Calif., Boulder and Huntsville, Ala.

Mentor Graphics bought Veribest in December 1999, and Gabe and Mentor decided to part ways. And, that’s when he took the fateful call from Mike Markowitz, then editor-in-chief of EDN (now director of Media Relations Americas Region for STMicroelectronics). Gabe became a technical editor covering EDA and made a complete career change. Or, maybe his career came full circle.

Being an observer of the EDA industry from its inception, along with his heavily technical background, has given Gabe a perception few other industry influencers have.

After a five-year stint at EDN, Gabe worked for the EETimes network managing EDA DesignLine, balancing a four-year run as editor-in-chief of the defunct DAC e-newsletter DACeZine. He and fellow industry influencer Peggy Aycinena earlier this year launched EDAMarket, a broad-sweeping effort to cover news, analyze the market and keep everyone abreast of the comings and goings in the industry. Son Travis, who is an independent consultant in San Jose, Calif., is the site’s webmaster.

During the EDN years, Gabe and Linda, his wife of 40 years, moved to Venice, Fla., where they’ve thrown themselves into cultural activities of the area or, for Gabe, the golf scene. For example, Linda is on the Board of Trustees of the Sarasota Opera, “where she is heavily involved and much appreciated,” Gabe notes with much pride. He helps out, as an ordinary volunteer and counselor.

Gabe plays golf once a week at various times during the year, depending on the season. In the summer, it’s an early tee time, along with an improving golf game.
And while Florida is a vacation travel spot, their form of vacation and travel is cruising. “We’ve mostly been on the side of this side of the world –– North America and Europe. I have crossed the Atlantic ocean five times on a ship.” Up next is their first voyage to the distant lands of the Pacific Ocean. During a month-long cruise, they will visit Hawaii, South Pacific Island, New Zealand and Australia.

Anyone who’s spent time with him quickly learns that Gabe’s also an excellent cook, and has a love of good food, good wine and good company. He also loves fast cars and formerly owned an arrest-me red Ferrari. Nowadays, he drives a Toyota Prius.

And, now for a bit of the unexpected. An area of ongoing fascination for Gabe unrelated to semiconductors or EDA is the Rosicrucian AMORC (Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis) organization, that’s the study of mysticism, philosophy and religions.

One obvious note of satisfaction is his work on industry standards. “I’ve been involved in standards making for a long time,” he continues. In fact, he motivated the formation of the IEEE Corporate Advisory Group that sponsors EDA standards.
His first standards effort was EDIF (Electronic Design Interchange Format) in 1980, that nascent attempt to link CAD tools together.

From there, Gabe got involved with VHDL and the IEEE Standards Committee through his work with Vantage. He served on the VHDL International Board of Directors for many years and was the chair of the group when it merged with Open Verilog International in 2000. It was Gabe and Mentor Graphics’ Dennis Brophy, then OVI chair, who convinced the two organizations to join forces and Gabe came up with Accellera as the name to describe the new entity. “Accellera is the imperative in Italian of speed up,” he says.

For his noteworthy standards work, he was recognized with the IEEE DASC Ron Waxman Award for meritorious service, given to him at an event in Miami in 2007. His sponsors and hosts were standards stalwarts Dennis Brophy, Karen Bartleson and Yatin Trivedi of Synopsys and industry consultant Victor Berman. All helped him celebrate the award with loads of good cheer, laughter and friendships that endure today.

As we close the profile on Gabe Moretti, it seems obvious that his job at the LA Times, while removed from the actual business of the newsroom, left a lasting impression. One is left to wonder if he, like many a newspaperman or woman, has ink in his blood. It certainly seems so.