Yes, it's true, the Cadence Academic Network is having its tenth anniversary. The program is run by Patrick Haspel, who is now based in San Jose. However, he is from Mannheim in Germany, and when it started, the academic network was purely a European exercise. I sat down with Patrick to get the story of how it started, and how it grew to what it is today, operating not just in Europe, but across the US and much of Asia. To read details about how it works in Asia, see my post Cadence Academic Network Asia . ASIC Competence Center in Mannheim Before Patrick joined Cadence, he was in academia himself at Universität Mannheim (Mannheim is about halfway between Frankfurt and Stuttgart). The roots of the academic network started with a negative Cadence experience there. He was tasked to develop a digital design lecture series, both front-end, and back-end. He wanted to put together a single flow. However, there was no single vendor you could pick in that era, it was still "the point tool mess". He went to DATE in Paris and tried to convince companies to give them software for free. A couple of small companies, Silicon Perspective and Plato (Nanoroute) were easy to talk to, but then both companies were acquired by Cadence and he lost contact. Nobody wanted to talk to him again. There was nobody at Cadence who wanted to talk to a university. So at the university level, they created their first network since they needed to share their best practices. That was the first ASIC competence center. Once that was up and running, he went to Cadence roadshows and met one person who was willing to talk: Gunther Strube, the VCAD business manager, committed to helping. Around 2002 they got their first VCAD contract at the university to get access to tools. VCAD stands for Virtual Integrated CAD and was the first time groups of tools were pre-integrated to increase productivity. Patrick Joins Cadence Patrick joined Cadence in a sales role in 2005. He didn't work on universities at all, he was hired as a technical consultant to the Infineon Sales Team in Munich. Infineon had spun out from Siemens in 1999, and subsequently, they spun off the memory part of the business as Qimonda. But Qimonda struggled in the DRAM business and Cadence decided to restructure the sales team, and no longer consider it a global account, but a regional one. So Patrick was moved to the sales team, and once again started to talk about the experience that had been through with the first VCAD contract in Mannheim with the ASIC competence center. Around 2006, he started to talk about more than just making the technology available. Back then, it was structured so that you could pay a certain amount of money to Europractice and get some licenses for a year or two. Europractice still handles the interface between Cadence and the majority of the 360 universities and research institutes in Europe. Cadence Academic Network is Born In October 2007, ten years ago, Cadence formally introduced the Cadence Academic Network, which was designed for universities to work together. It started as a pilot program in central Europe, then Europe, and then the entire EMEA region. Finally, about 3 years ago, it started to be introduced into the other regions. The academic network is different from a standard university software program. It enables universities to use the software properly, as well as connection to the professors for recruiting. It also lets Cadence tap into the research competencies and interests of the professors (joint collaboration). Of course, there is a marketing angle, improving the perception of the Cadence brand, presenting at their conferences, and sponsoring academic events. It is a stable partnership between industry and academia, with knowledge, tools, and students moving. Professors are reluctant to give a company like Cadence their best graduates unless they get something in return. From the beginning, one rule has been that no commercial deal should suffer from the existence of the university program. However, having said that, there need to be ways to build pathways to commercial use since universities work with other industrial partners (one university worked on a Broadcom project, for example). Of course, sometimes professors spin out startups. So now all that complex paperwork is in place and can handle events like that. The Academic Network Goes Global On Valentine's day 2015, Patrick relocated to the US from Europe to take the experience built up in Europe to the US and Asia. By 2016, the academic network has been quite successful at encouraging Cadence R&D to do research projects. There are plans for an academic summit so Cadence R&D managers can talk about what research they do with academia. And with all the hype around machine learning, maybe it will make sense to do a machine learning symposium. Cadence has no central corporate function that is technical—all technical people part of a Cadence business unit—which makes coordinating a little more complex. Patrick would also like to encourage engineers to visit their alma mater when they are traveling and present the program (and Cadence) back at their old university. Anton Klotz, who runs the academic network in Europe today, took 3 AEs who were alumni of Lund (Sweden) back and it was a great day for everyone. Patrick said to me: What I’m proud of is that over the years we have developed strong relationships with the professors, even when there is no cash contribution from Cadence. It is good to see what we have in Europe, where the network is more established. It makes a difference for the company. Video...and a Video Challenge There is a special Ten Year Anniversary page on the Cadence website. One aspect of the ten year anniversary is a video challenge. Start by writing a short note (300-1000 words) answering these two questions: How has participation in the Cadence University Program impacted your institution and classroom? If access to a Cadence expert was provided to your institution, how would you use your time with the expert? Authors of selected essays will then be invited to showcase their creativity by turning the essay into a short video. The videos will be judged and winners determined. What do you win? First, you can use your time with a Cadence expert just as you wrote, since the first thing is that we will send one to your university or research institution. Plus you will get to attend CDNLive in your region in 2018. Cadence will provide a free airfare and hotel. Full details and a link to enter are on the anniversary page . Cadence made their own video about the ten year anniversary too. Watch below: https://youtu.be/C5ur-9t9ZLs Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.![]()
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