by Peggy Aycinena

Las Vegas, NV - June 19, 2001 - In a muscular tour de force, Broadcom Corp. Co-Chairman and CTO Henry Samueli held his audience spellbound as he swiftly reviewed the history of electronic design, the academic initiatives that led to seminal breakthroughs in the technology, the various business models that have dominated the semiconductor industry over time, today's increasingly voracious demand for connectivity bandwidth, the nature of design teams in the past, present, and future, as well as the emerging landscape for system-level design. He ended with a primer for the design tool vendors that articulated everything they must do to meet their customers' needs and to guarantee continued prosperity for the EDA industry. In short, it was a thorough and succinct presentation, elegantly compressed into 45 minutes-those who overslept due to Monday night's social events lost out big time.

. Synopsys Senior Vice President Dierdre Hanford praised Samueli after the talk and said that the entire Synopsys team in attendance was inspired by his example to improve upon the style and the quality of their own public speaking. Samueli stated that the worldwide demand for on-line bandwidth would be met by a convergent data/voice network integrated across a landscape, which includes the LAN, access networks, metro networks, and the "core network" - the global web providing instant access to any node on the face of the earth. He said the diverse technologies needed to accomplish all of this require vigorous R&D at all levels - from algorithms to DSP architectures, high performance mixed-signal and analog integrations, and complex product implementations. Reviewing several decades of government and university sponsored research - culminating with his team's legendary efforts out of the University of California Los Angeles - Samueli said there must be even more going forward.

Giving the nod to what has become common wisdom among his listeners, Samueli said that now "it's more than systems on silicon - the system is silicon now. Any skeptics in the audience were cowed by his technical discourse on a string of Broadcom chips that have grown bigger, faster, more sophisticated, and more chock full of intellectual property (IP) blocks. His most complex example showcased a single-system chip that included a cable modem, radio-access control logic, networking transceivers, voice index for VoIP, AD/DA converters, numerous DSP engines, voice compression capability, USB, PCI, Ethernet, and "dozens and dozens" of IP blocks. The chip required 3 system designers, 25 digital designers, 7 analog designers, and 14 layout engineers - a fascinating metric reflecting the current state of design demands on-chip.

He said that 80 percent to 90 percent of the IP was reused and, even then, the product needed 50 engineers - in stark contrast to Broadcom's first products, which were designed by the "tall thin engineer" who attended to the whole ball of wax from spec to design, layout, verification, and test.

Finally, he challenged EDA vendors to meet his needs by integrating their flow, working to system-level design strategies, and - most importantly - by partnering with their customers in the hugely complex projects underway and by providing resources and inspiration to universities to guarantee that the requisite numbers of highly trained engineers further populate the industry. Samueli's presentation was videotaped and will be viewable in its entirety on the DAC website (www.dac.com) by the end of the week's conference.