Longtime EDA industry editor Peggy Aycinena posed an interesting question with a blog post titled "CES 2014: Why was Cadence there?"
She noted that ARM has a presence at CES:
"But Cadence? Why would they be there? Synopsys wasn't listed as an exhibitor at CES, nor Mentor Graphics, nor Jasper, nor Gradient, nor Forte, nor IC Manage, nor Nimbic. So why Cadence? Why an EDA company?"
She went on to present some reasons Cadence appeared at CES and some reasons why Synopsys didn't exhibit at CES.
But, really, the better headline question is "Why didn't more EDA vendors and IP companies exhibit at CES 2014?"
IP's Importance
After all, the two top EDA companies are now among the top four global IP providers. Cadence--after acquisitions in recent years of Denali,Tensilica, and Evatronix (IP business)--has signaled that IP is central to a modern EDA company's mission, that cores don't exist effectively without methodologies, tools flows, and verification IP and environments.
To get an inside answer as to why Cadence went to CES - and also why Cadence will exhibit at Mobile World Congress next month in Barcelona, Spain - I called Martin Lund, senior vice president for Cadence's IP group.
Lund said:
"Why? Because we now have differentiated IP. We are able to raise that awareness with our customer base and make sure that people are thinking about us when making those decisions."
CES and Mobile World Congress are places executive management and system architects attend to get a sense for what their customers and their customers' customers are going to be designing in the next 18 to 24 months. (Cadence kept three conference rooms nearly full during CES with meetings with CTOs and system architects who are designing next-generation, innovative consumer products).
"They're looking for differentiation. What are the major trends in the market? What do I need to do to stay relevant and become more relevant through innovation?"
Lund, who attended CES and will attend next week's Mobile World Congress, also said those architects and executives were interested in, for example, Tensilica's technical roadmap, and how they might offload the work of designing interface IP to focus on their core design strengths, among other things.
Lund went on:
"Some of the (CES) conversations were around how important is voice recognition and voice trigger going to be in the future. What classes of devices are going to need it? TV, gateway router, refrigerator; where does it start and stop? We had a lot of discussions: Can you do it in software or do you need dedicated hardware? There are conflicting trends there. We have an opinion about what is the right answer."
But CES 2014 or Mobile World Congress is not just about the IP. It sends a message to the system architects and managers and executives that a broad-line, 25-year-old EDA company is thinking differently about how systems are and will be architected, enabled, and verified in the future.
Those are some of the key reasons why Cadence exhibits at such huge, consumer-electronics-themed events.
Watch for our live-streaming starting this weekend from Barcelona to get all the sights, sounds, and insights from MWC.
Brian Fuller
Related stories:
-- Cadence at CES 2014: Live Blog, Tensilica IP Demos, and More
-- CES 2014: Past Is Prologue for Electronics Design