Israeli conference highlights design costs
More than 800 semiconductor professionals gathered in Tel Aviv, to take part in ChipEx2010 - The annual global conference of the Israeli semiconductor industry. The conference started with greetings from Prof. Daniel Hershkovitz, Israel's Science & Technology minister and focused on the future directions of the semiconductor industry. ChipEx2010 was produced by TapeOut magazine, Israel's leading magazine for the semiconductor industry in collaboration with GSA (Global Semiconductor Alliance). ChipEx2010 is Israel's largest tradeshow and conference for semiconductor technologies, and was held on May 4, 2010, in Tel Aviv, Israel.
In a keynote speech given by Gary Smith, the no. 1 analyst of the semiconductor industry, he addressed the issue of the growing costs of Chip design. "We have to reduce the chip design costs back to the level of the 90's." he said "In order to do so the EDA tools' vendors need to improve the tools for the embedded systems software and make is suitable for multicore systems. It looks like virtualization is the key for designing the multicore chips. It will allow the engineers to use the virtualization not only for dealing with scheduling but will also help save power.
Rajeev Madhavan, CEO of Magma Design Automation and another speaker at the plenary session of ChipEx2010, spoke about the challenges of the EDA industry:
"In the last three years, the EDA industry is facing stagnation. This lead us to develop new business approaches which will allow us to grow. We develop new licensing models to help us sell more licenses with larger market share."
Mr. Madhavan also noted: "The EDA industry should move to "best in class" instead of working in the "me too" mode. This will force the tools vendors to come up with the best tools. "I am very impressed with the Israeli fables companies. There are many talents here and I see this as an opportunity to make the difference in the semiconductor market".
Simon Bloch, Vice President and General Manager, Design and Synthesis Division was quite enthusiastic about the number of participants at ChipEx2010. "We certainly see Israel as one of the major centers for innovative thinking and unique knowledge which we want to use for our developments. This is also one of the reasons why we acquired two Israeli technology based companies in the last 9 months and added 150 employees which develop ESL and PCB technologies for Mentor. I am very impressed with the number of exhibitors which is similar to the number of exhibitors at DATE.
Other speakers at the plenary session included Eyal Waldman, Chairman and CEO of Mellanox inc. and the winner of the 2009 "CEO of the Year" award, Grant Pierce, CEO of SONICS, Inc, Moshe Zalceberg, General Manager of Cadence Israel and Maty Visman, Director of application consulting at Synopsys Inc.
ChipEx2010 also included a technical conference with 32 speakers and moderators and a trade show with more than 60 exhibiting companies from USA, UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Greece, Taiwan, India, and Japan.
We are very happy with the number of attendees and exhibitors at ChipEx2010," said Sol Gradman, Chairman of ChipEx2010. "The purpose of ChipEx2010 was to showcase companies and products at the intersection of design and technology, and also offer strategic insights via our keynote speakers. We received very good feedbacks from both exhibitors and visitors and are happy to provide the major platform of interaction between all people involved with the semiconductor industry in Israel.
