Archive for January, 2010

Navraj Nandra joined Synopsys in 2005 as product marketing director for analog/mixed-signal IP. His responsibilities include product line and roadmap definition for SerDes-based physical layer interfaces (PCIe Express, SATA, XAUI), high speed memory interfaces (DDR), HDMI, USB, data converters, audio CODECS and video front-ends. Navraj blogs for Synopsys at The Eyes Have It: A Mixed-Signal IP Blog.

Rick: What is the most interesting problem analog/mixed-signal IP experts are currently trying to solve?

Navraj: If I’m wearing my marketing/business development hat for analog/mixed-signal then the challenge is to convince centralized engineering teams that buying IP is a viable alternative to building it. I would go as far as saying that the quality of the deliverables we create are far superior to those created by a centralized team. So the question “How do you know that you have better quality” needs to be addressed. Finding a business model that supports our approach to standards-based IP, leveraging a reuse model, with some customer’s expectations on customized offerings is also a challenge. It is harder to make money on a services engagement. Harder to scale too.

Now putting on my technical marketing hat, the key challenge is to meet analog performance requirements of high speed PHYs, data converters, audio CODECs and video front ends in deep sub-micron CMOS technologies. Technologies are getting harder to design in and the protocols are getting faster, power consumption needs to be reduced and cost has become a design variable (driven by consumer demand). So it’s a quadruple whammy! Imagine, we can put a USB PHY on a 28-nm process designed for the latest MID. I think Aart calls it “techonomics.” He may not have had my concerns in mind, this is just my spin. The techonomics challenge of analog/mixed-signal IP – making it into a business with all the technology advances that actually hurt analog performance.

Rick: Are the solutions to these challenges likely to emerge through collaboration among various experts? If so, how does that type of collaboration take place?

Navraj: Yes it takes a village: process, design experts and CAD experts. We don’t have all these folks at Synopsys so solutions require collaboration with the ecosystem, which consists of semiconductor foundries, industry special interest groups (like the PCI-SIG), and customers (of course!). This makes my job a lot of fun, actually.

Rick: How is your blogging activity different from your role as a director of product marketing?

Navraj: I keep the two separate. Blogging is more free(er) thought. My day job involves managing a team of experienced PMMs, driving the product roadmap, ensuring design wins by working with sales. The two endeavors cross sometimes – I like to use the blog to talk about some industry challenge or a new product announcement. I try not to make the blog an exclusive pitch for Synopsys products. That would be a turn-off, in my opinion.

Rick: Finally, how do you come up with ideas for blog topics?

Navraj: I’m never short on ideas! What I try to do is link two very different ideas to come up with something new (my favorite artists do this, like David Bowie and William Burroughs). For example I wanted to describe the differences in the Synopsys mixed-signal IP business and the Chipidea model, which was more custom orientated. I used the analogy of mixing a Strauss waltz with a Punjabi bangra – this was our opening wedding dance.

Lou Covey has been a professional communicator for more than 30 years as a journalist, technical writer and corporate communications consultant. He has written for the Palo Alto Times, San Jose Mercury-News, Lodi News-Sentinel, Sacramento Bee, New York Times, ECN and MacWorld – and he covered the 1976 presidential campaign with the national press corps. Since 1990, Lou has represented leading embedded software and hardware suppliers, electronics firms, and CAD software companies. He currently manages the communication strategies firm Footwasher Media and it’s PR service VitalCom. Lou blogs at State of the Media.

Rick: As one with extensive experience helping technology companies communicate with engineers, what’s different today (compared to a couple years ago) with regard to how engineers use the Internet to inform and advance their professional interests?

Lou: Probably the biggest change is that the audience for technology companies has grown far beyond just engineers.  The collapse of the “free” media infrastructure has left a huge void for multiple audiences that were once better served by a professional media that is now very limited.  Engineers who used to rely on news releases and company websites for the bulk of their information also had the balancing effect of an independent media to provide a “reality check” on marketing messages.  With that ballast removed from the equation, they can’t be as sure they are getting the straight story from their corporate information sources. 

Social media has stepped in to a certain extent, but much of it is still corporate noise.  That’s just in the engineering world.  Corporate financial people and investors relied more heavily on the media to provide the bottom line information that endorsed either the purchase of products or investment in startups… or even the purchase of stock.  I’ve found in my own web stats that most of my readers are either CFOs or VCs looking for some sort of independent analysis of technology and directions. 

For engineers this lack of information hampers their ability to make their companies financially viable.  I’ve recently been approached by a new angel group to come and consult on potential investment directions for them and help them do the due diligence.  A couple of years ago, they could have found that information in both the trade and business press. Now they are coming to people like me, which gives a communication consultant the role of gatekeeper to funding. 

Rick: If you could fast-forward into the future, what does this picture look like two years from now?

Lou: I think it’s coming full circle.  I took a hiatus from journalism in the early 80s and worked as a technical editor for an aerospace company, my first exposure to technology writing.  But I had no technology background.  The company hired me because of my experience and training as a writer.  They didn’t want their engineers involved in the writing for two reasons: they had better things for engineers to do and the engineers had no idea how to communicate with their customers.  The company I worked for found value in the ability to communicate and had a separate value for engineering.  Worked pretty well.

Now I can’t imagine any industry allowing independent communications consultants to have the kind of power I mentioned previously.  They are going to want to bring that in house, somehow, even if it means contracting with the consultants.  To be effective, that kind of arrangement will require real dedication to ethics that most consultants have little knowledge of at the moment, but it will become necessary.  Companies that continue to believe that their technology and expertise is all they need to succeed will fail.  Most won’t even get enough funding to get off the ground.  And established companies that don’t learn the secrets of real communication — not just pumping out marketing messages — will start to fail as well.

We will see a new crop of industry leaders with a renewed value on the ability to communicate.  those that don’t change will disappear no matter how great their technology or product is.

Rick: What are the primary challenges faced by corporate communicators in this everybody-connected-to-everybody landscape?

Lou: Getting the engineers in charge of the process to allow trained communicators to do communication.  I’ve been in this business almost 40 years now and I’ve seen precious few marketers, much less engineers, who understood how the media worked when everything was healthy.  How can anyone expect them to understand a new paradigm that has cropped up under their noses in the past five years?  The people best equipped to explore and implement social media strategies are those who understand how media works.

Right now, engineers believe all they need to do is communicate with other engineers, but they need to learn how to address multiple audiences or pay people who know how to do that job.  I’m not even sure engineers can communicate with other engineers outside of their own discipline.  A verification engineer can converse easily with another verification engineer, but I’ve been in several meetings with engineers from software, verification, test, etc. and none of them knew what the other was talking about.  That might have been acceptable 10 years ago, but it won’t work now.  A professional communicator can overcome that chaos.

Rick: It’s generally understood that using social media channels like Twitter to broadcast a steady diet of press releases is a sure way to lose followers. Do you agree and, on a broader scale, what do you suggest the PR community do to adapt to a world forever changed by Web 2.0 – and why?

Lou: If it were generally understood, people wouldn’t continue doing it. But smart-ass comments aside, the PR community needs to first learn and adhere to a standard of ethics similar to the Society of Professional Journalists or, at least the Public Relations Society of America, which adapted their standards from the former.  Second, they need to learn to say “no” to clients.  It is considered business suicide to do either.  I know it’s tough, but it’s the reason I do very little work with semiconductor and EDA companies now.  I refuse to take payment to follow a paradigm I know will fail.

It is not hard to find PR professionals who totally get social media.  It’s not hard to find pros who want to put it into effect.  What is hard is to find clients that are willing to change from the steady drumbeat of press releases and lead generation and really start to communicate with their market.  And that makes it hard for the PR folks to adopt social media practices… oe even effective communications strategies.  Even Gary Smith has said that the PR pros in EDA are some of the best there are in the business, but the EDA industry as a whole really has no respect for communications professionals either on the PR side or on the journalism side.  That’s why it is in the state it is in now.

What passes for social media is exactly what you described: a new avenue to post press releases.  But that practice does not embrace the real strength of the medium.  An ethical practitioner would not only tell the client (or employer) that fact, but would refuse to continue to get paid for doing something that just doesn’t work.

When you are selling underwear, believing the customer is always right is not a bad way to do business, but when you are tasked with making a client successful, you better have a backbone.

Rick: Given the proprietary and confidential nature of most design projects, are there natural limitations to the adoption and use of social media among engineers?

Lou: Most proprietary and confidential labels put on the projects have been placed there for no other reason than that someone said they should be.  If you have a patentable idea, then patent it.  If not, someone else has probably figured it out before you did.  The software world has known this for years and because they openly share their technology issues with each other, they are more successful and profitable than the semiconductor and EDA industries.  So the primary natural limitation on engineers using social media is conventional wisdom.  Sometimes you need to step outside the box.

However, what most people don’t realize about social media is that it doesn’t have to be open to everyone.  You can limit who is in your circle with a couple of clicks of a mouse.

Let me be very clear here, we keep referring to engineers like they are a monolithic group.  It isn’t true.  In fact, in the past 10 years of working with engineers from multiple disciplines, I find the EDA engineering community to be the most paranoid and insular of all.  When the economy was booming and people were throwing money at EDA companies with little regard for profitability, it was not hard to ensconce yourself in a hermetically sealed jar.  That time is over and, guess what, it isn’t coming back.  I think I can wrap it up with one of my favorite quotes from Helen Keller.

“Security is an illusion.  Life is an adventure or it is nothing at all.”

Learn that, get used to it and your life will be much more satisfying.  And if you have a hard time getting your head around it, call.  Our rates are reasonable.

John Donovan has spent 25 years writing about technology: twelve doing mostly semiconductor PR and an equal amount as an editor at EDN Asia, Circuits Assembly Asia, PC Fabrication Asia and Portable Design where he manned the tiller for the last four of its twelve years. John has also published two books, dozens of manuals, hundreds of articles and a rapidly-expanding library of blog posts.

In the following interview, John shares some of his thoughts on blogging, social media as it relates to engineers… and more.

Rick: As someone who has written extensively about technology from “both sides of the inbox” (editorial and semiconductor PR), what are the key changes social media has brought to the way engineers find and engage with content that’s relevant to their specific interests?

John: Most engineers already get the bulk of their information online, so they’re comfortable with the medium. Print will probably always be a better medium for reading long technical articles, but good luck with the business plan.

Engineers have always been skeptical of any information that comes from a corporate PR source, since their job is to depict a product in the best possible light, often omitting limitations that you as a designer may need to know—or burying key points in a load of marketing bumpf, which really sets an engineer’s teeth on edge. Also engineers tend to see PR people as technical lightweights, which doesn’t enhance their credibility. As an editor I’ve ended plenty of briefings with, “Send me the datasheet.”

Engineers look for advice from people they can trust, which generally means other engineers. Engineering blogs have become a very popular source of information and interchange. While corporate bloggers may be regarded with a grain of suspicion, they’re generally very well informed and highly responsive. And there are always thousands of readers who can jump in with other perspectives. By now I think most engineers track blogs that cover their design interests and follow the threads of interesting conversations.

Traditional media try to get this sort of interchange going by adding a Comments section after each article, but that doesn’t begin to keep up with the action on blogs, which are starting to create real communities of readers with shared interests. Blogs are the new water coolers, where you can kick around problems with your colleagues, who just happen to be thousands of miles away.

Rick: Why do you think so many traditional publishers have been slow to pick up on the electronic media tsunami that’s clearly washed ashore?

John: There are both generational and business reasons. Most print publications are run by older guys like me who grew up with print and paper. I wrote for a newspaper back in the ‘60s that used an old Mergenthaler linotype machine. I loved the clank of that contraption when the paper was being composed and the smell of ink when it was being printed with lead type. Going to digital prepress and printing was a real hurdle for the publisher, but they survived it. For traditional publishers, digital distribution is just a bridge too far. And when they’re finally forced to cross that bridge, they’re strangers in a strange land.

On the business side, print ads have always been the cash cow for publishers, and anything that threatens that franchise encounters resistance. Online ads are extremely attractive to advertisers because they don’t entail printing and distribution costs, therefore they’re cheap (read: low profit); they can be microtargeted; their results can be accurately measured; and they enable reader feedback, which is highly desirable. As a result they’re replacing print ads and wiping out print-based books in the process.

Finally, there’s this blogger thing—what’s that about? Anyone who can’t make that transition is drifting into the past.

Rick: You’ve been authoring a blog, Donovan’s Brain, for over two years. Why did you become a blogger and why do you continue?

John: I got extremely frustrated working for a monthly magazine that at the time only updated the online material monthly. First I hectored the web team to at least let me update the news section daily, though their home-made template wouldn’t let me upload graphics. So I figured out how to upload graphics and even videos to Google and embed HTML links to them in my stories. But even feature stories on the magazine site didn’t include embedded graphics, which was way beyond embarrassing.

Frankly I finally started my own blog on Blogger to show the web team what cool stuff you could do with a little imagination. In the process I discovered I could suddenly cover events in a timely manner and add my perspective while it still mattered, not feeling as constrained in the new format as I did in the magazine. This was probably just me crossing over the mental bridge I mentioned earlier. But once you cross over, there’s no going back.

Rick: In your experience, how is blog writing different from journalistic writing, and do you believe one has inherently more credibility and influence than the other?

John: Journalists have long been trained to “leave opinions to the opinion page and just report the facts,” as if facts were something concrete and obvious to any observer—which they rarely if ever are. What bloggers, like the best writers, add is an informed perspective, though it’s up to you to decide just how informed they are, which facts they choose to highlight or overlook, how closely they hue to the facts at hand and how logical are their conclusions. You need to exercise some judgment when you’re reading someone else’s judgment. That requires you to be a more thoughtful reader, which is a good thing. Even if you don’t agree with a writer’s perspective, just being aware of it will give you a more nuanced view of the situation.

The distinction between journalism and opinion has always been artificial, and bloggers completely cross the line. I don’t want to read some rehashed meeting notes or PR talking points. I want some background, context and help in putting a story in perspective. Blogging is simply opinionated reporting. The best bloggers are often ex-journalists, finally free to express themselves. Many journalists now also have a blog, so the distinction is getting blurrier all the time.

I don’t think one’s credibility is determined by the medium—it’s entirely dependent on the message. Bloggers contribute some of the best reporting today. If I read something that I think is quite incisive, I don’t care if it’s in a blog, the Op Ed page of the New York Times or the front page of EE Times. I’ll dial the author in on Twitter to follow their writing wherever it appears.

Rick: Finally, what is the long-term potential for social media within engineering communities – and what impediments stand between where we are today and the fulfillment of that potential?

John: Social media have a great future within the engineering community because they enable engineers to form communities with shared interests. Engineers will always prefer to consult, kvetch and kid around with other engineers.

There are probably very few engineers who aren’t already on LinkedIn, which is sort of Facebook for professionals. Aside from being the most effective way to hit the panic button if you get laid off, LinkedIn is a great way to stay connected with old colleagues and find out what it’s like to work for a potential employer. LinkedIn groups are an excellent way to get help from others working on the same technical problems that are plaguing you. Expect this to happen more and more.

A lot of companies are using Facebook to put a human face on the corporation, but I think most engineers use it mainly to stay in touch with family and friends—I certainly do. Still, it’s hard to have it both ways: presenting both a business face and a personal face at the same time. However, Facebook works well when you become friends with colleagues, so I expect engineers will increasingly take it up as they expand their social circles.

Twitter is another matter. Engineers have been slow to pick up on it. That’s changing, since Twitter can quickly point you to a lot of technical material that you might otherwise have missed. Twitter is also a great way to follow people who usually have something to say that you’d like to hear. Still, Twitter is a bit ‘out there’ for most engineers, so it may be a while before it hits an inflection point with them.