The ESL Edge

DAC is still a big deal for our industry. It brings together researchers, EDA vendors and users to share information and ideas. I recently had the pleasure of talking to Chris Kappler, a founder of a small startup that will be at DAC for the first time this year.

Brian: First of all can you introduce yourself?

Chris: Sure, I have been with Achilles Test Systems as one of the founders, since 2006. I come from an ASIC and FPGA background, mainly in the areas of computer networking and graphics. I have been lucky enough to work with some of the best engineers imaginable at Cisco Systems, C-port, Meta Systems, Mitsibishi, UB Networks and Sun Labs. Prior to Achilles, I had only worked on the technical side of product development. Needless to say, playing a founding role in a company has taught me a thing or two.

Brian: Briefly, tell me a little bit about Achilles Test.

Chris: Achilles Test Systems’ products and services fill a simple and virtually unmet need of FPGA and ASIC teams. Our goal is to bring all of a team’s design and verification results together in one place for easy browsing and debug, real-time status, and historical trend analysis in a web browser. Modern teams are executing synthesis, static analysis, and verification jobs on 100’s or 1000’s of CPUs every day. Small teams are expected not only to digest the information that is created by all of this computation, but also to have a reasonable idea of how these things are changing over the life of the project. Achilles offers a set of tools that make it easy for engineers to harvest that information and tie it together on their desktop. This makes it easy to create single-page summaries of both real-time and historical result tracking for users to tag, monitor, and act on. We are getting great feedback from customers about the way it has changed their day-to-day work.

Brian: What made you decide that this year was to be your DAC debut year?

Chris: I personally think that this year should be very exciting at DAC, and I wouldn’t have wanted to miss it. No-one denies that the past twelve months have been hard on the industry. As a result, exhibitors and attendees alike have had to question the ROI of coming to DAC or any conference. I think that we can assume that the people who are coming this year have a compelling reason to do so. I am expecting both attendees and exhibitors to be talking about very clearly defined problems and solutions.

As a company, the main reason why we decided to attend this year has to do with the timing of our solutions to market needs. DAC is obviously an enormous opportunity for a small company to get a year’s worth of customer feedback in 3-4 days. From what we can tell, this is the year when engineers are realizing that all of the automation and parallelism that has been built into EDA tools is starting to take a toll on teams. The more automated things get, the more visibility and transparency the team needs in order to keep up with their own work flows. This year especially, teams are smaller and the costs of failure are higher, so we think that this is the year when our value proposition is easiest to demonstrate.

Brian: What do you hope to gain from being at DAC?

Chris: Our first EDA conference was DVCon in Feb 2009, and we got a lot out of it. We are expecting even more out of DAC since it is a bigger conference and will have a more diverse attendee base. Our focus is on bringing tool and simulation result information from the whole team together in one place, so the chance to talk to engineers and managers about a wider variety of results management issues should be exciting. We know how our customers deploy DV Notebook in the verification space. We are using DAC as a chance to meet people who are looking for the same types of productivity gains in architectural simulations, front-end synthesis, back-end synthesis, static code analysis, and embedded software development.

We will be organizing a birds of a feather session on project health which will allow a little more structured sharing and conversation. We will also be presenting a paper that we submitted as part of the DAC user track. We had a sell out crowd at a recent DVClub talk and we are hoping that these ideas will generate just as much excitement at DAC. The goal is to meet as many people as possible and get as much feedback as we can, and so we plan to take advantage of the lounges, hotel bars, breakfast, lunches, and dinners.

We learned a lot at DVCon by being able to talk dozens of working engineers and managers in three days. At a conference we can quickly learn about our customers’ needs and market competition. We have some tips and tricks to share about building dashboards for organizing and analyzing the results of your product development, and we are looking to collaborate, whether with prospects, partners, or other like minded individuals. We want to maximize the chance to learn, to get better at what we do, and to grow.

Brian: How easy have you found the whole process?

Chris: We are not a Cadence, Synopsys, or Mentor, and our tools are not a drop-in replacements for any standard tool. Like many of the startups at DAC, we are addressing a new part of the problem that not all customers have identified or sought to solve. A startup does not have enough influence or drawing power on its own to make a show work. However by banding together at DAC, we offer a one-stop marketplace for discovery, contribution, and sharing. In EDA, much of the innovation has been driven by the startups, maybe even more than by the big players. DAC attendees know this. They are not coming to such a large show to hit up the three big booths and call it a day. They are there to see the new stuff. In spite of this, since DAC is a really BIG show, our challenge will be getting noticed without the same marketing budget as some other firms.

What I would say to people is, if you want to see the latest tools from Synopsys, Mentor, or Cadence, they will gladly come into your place of business and demonstrate them for you. DAC is your only chance to see some of these startups side-by-side. Take advantage of it.

Brian: Any surprises along the way?

Chris: Most of my surprises have come from the change in role, from engineer to vendor. As an engineer and a technical contributor, if you have a new idea or a new methodology, other teams and groups are generally receptive. If your ideas make sense and if there is a nice improvement in performance, cost, or productivity, things get started with almost no evaluation or overhead. When you come into these same teams as a vendor, the rules are completely different. As a vendor in meeting with prospective customers, I have had to pay a lot more attention to what their exact situation is and how we can demonstrate, in their context, that our technology is going to help them. We do a lot of benchmarks and evaluations to prove what we can do.

Even the way that we introduce the problem and tell our story has needed to change. As an engineer, I feel compelled to start with the details and work up to conclusions. As a vendor, we tend to do more of a progressive disclosure, to see if there is a fit before diving into all of the details. It’s not that customers don’t want the details, but not everyone will be a customer.

Brian: What do you feel about the lack of a “Free Monday”?

Chris: It is our first year, so we don’t have anything to compare it with. We don’t really have an informed opinion either way. If I weren’t attending as an exhibitor or presenter, I would certainly be willing to pay to see what the latest batch of startups are up to.

Brian: Some people say that Free Monday attracted nothing but trinket gatherers. Will you be giving out any trinkets?

Chris: No, we don’t have any trinkets, but we promise great conversations. I would welcome anyone who has a results-management problem to come by booth #912.  We will be happy to meet you and brainstorm. The other 60+ startups at DAC will make it worth your $50 and more importantly your time. There is some cool activity that is going on that you should keep on your radar.

Brian: Thanks Chris. The question about Free Monday has now become mute, since EDAC today decided to sponsor this tradition. For more information and the sign-up link see the DAC free day blog discussion.

———————————————————————————–

Brian Bailey

email me at brian_bailey at acm.org