edaForum05 Presentation

Business Session I

Jay N. Greenberg, Synopsys

Chip Design: It s Not Just for Techno-Nerds Anymore

Abstract

For years, we thought of chip design as a technical problem. However, as we move towards 65 and 45 nm and cope with the shift to a consumer-driven, global economy, chip design increasingly confronts us as a leadership and management problem. If we agree that management is doing things right and leadership is doing the right things, then what are the implications for our companies under increasing performance pressure from our customers and shareholders?

Yesterday, industry economics allowed us to launch many chip designs and let market acceptance pick the winners. Today, accelerating complexity, NRE and fabrication costs force difficult decisions. Which chips designs should we launch? How do we increase their probability of success? At the beginning of each chip design, there are many possible specifications, a virtually infinite number of ways to achieve them (some are very innovative and risky), and many unknowns: uncertainty is very high. As leaders and managers, what innovation, risk and uncertainty-reducing processes should we embrace? How should we optimize between QOR, COR and TTR?

We used to get acceptable results by creating our EDA flows out of best-in-class point tools. Area, timing, power, testability and yieldability are highly interdependent in advanced process technologies: we cannot address them in isolation. How should we achieve convergence? We need to build our flows around platforms of EDA tools that are complete, correlated and concurrent. In this presentation a leadership and management framework for thinking about these challenges will be presented.

Biography

Jay N. Greenberg Senior Vice President, Marketing Synopsys, Inc.

He joined Synopsys in November 2004 as Senior Vice President, Marketing. From 1998 until joining Synopsys, he was founder and President of Green Mountain Solutions, a consulting firm.

From 1999 to 2003 he was employed by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Ltd. (TSMC), where he held the positions of Vice President of Business Development and Vice President of Strategic Marketing. Mr. Greenberg served as Vice President and Senior Partner at Thomas Group, Inc., a consulting firm, from 1987 through 1998. Earlier in his career, he held executive, management and technical positions at Memorex, Amdahl and EDS. Mr. Greenberg holds a B.A. from the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California.