this. First, Cadence doesn't participate in the market for FPGA tools (for FPGA users. I'm pretty sure the arrays themselves are almost all designed on Virtuoso). Second, it's not a market I know a lot about, having been in the ASIC, foundry, IDM part of the business all my career. And thirdly, there is another person who trod a similar path to me and went from being an EDA insider to a journalist, but specifically the FPGA part of EDA. That would be Kevin Morris. When I first met him, he was running marketing for Exemplar, Mentor's FPGA synthesis product line (I was helping Mentor run a strategic planning process for the business). He left and created FPGA Journal, which has morphed into today's EE Journal, providing daily coverage of the industry.
But he lives in Oregon, when he's not running his media empire from his boat Airship. Achronix were having a ribbon-cutting party for their new building, just 10 minutes from Cadence, plus I know Kevin was on Airship heading for Alaska. This is what counts as a scoop in the cut-throat world of EDA journalism. Of course, I don't really care that much about a company moving to a new building, but an event like that is always a good opportunity to catch up with what's going on in the industry. I'd heard rumors that Achronix was doing really well, so I wanted to find out.