Profile - Simon Davidmann
British EDA pioneer and successful entrepreneur
by Bipin Parmar
Simon Davidmann's EDA career began in the late 70's when he got involved in the early days of pioneering hardware description languages at Essex and Brunel Universities in England. Simon Davidmann is one of those rare successful serial entrepreneurs to come out of Great Britain - with a track record in five EDA startups, all of which were successful and acquired by larger EDA companies.
Simon Davidmann
His most recent venture, Co-Design Automation, which he co-founded in 1998, was acquired by Synopsys in 2002 for $36 million. Simon has developed a well-honed strategy of identifying major productivity enhancing software tools for chip design bottlenecks and then doing pioneering work with leading-edge technologies, well before others get involved.
These skills were developed over a long time and started when he worked on a product called HILO (HILO was the world's first hardware language with timing, developed at Brunel University, with funding from the MoD. The product was later marketed by a company called Cirrus Computers, which was acquired by GenRad).
Simon's career turn resulted from being the only member of the HILO team who looked presentable and owned a suit. This took him to the United States, as an application engineer visiting early adopter customers like Wang, DEC and GI on the East coast. He realised at this time that the biggest potential for the product lay with semiconductor companies in Silicon Valley, who were pioneering the early ASIC market of gate arrays and standard cell; this led to Davidmann's subsequent focus on simulators, hardware language technologies and design productivity issues.
The first gate arrays were small - around 2,000 to 4,000 gates - and designers were using hand-written net lists and schematic capture to generate the inputs for the simulators. Simon and his colleagues, including Phil Moorby (who later went on to invent Verilog), realised that, as chip sizes increased to 10,000-100,000 gates and upwards, this form of design capture would give way to more descriptive hardware languages.
Simon's fondness for an English Rose brought him back to England to get married and settle in a new venture called Simmons Electronic Music, which pioneered electronic percussion instruments and drums. This was a useful experience for Simon - to understand systems design issues, including hardware/software design, verification, PCB design and layout, real time operating systems and application software.
In the late 80's Simon became the first European employee at Gateway Design Automation, started by Prabhu Goel. (Goel had been the first US user of HILO for ASIC design and subsequently hired Phil Moorby to develop Verilog, a more advanced hardware development language based on HILO.) After Gateway was acquired by Cadence Design Systems, Simon ended up at a new startup, called Chronologic Simulation Inc, which developed VCS, a leading Verilog simulator. Chronologic was acquired by Viewlogic, which was then acquired by Synopsys. Simon's attraction to companies which were BTBS (built to be sold) landed him at Virtual Chips, an early pioneer developing re-usable semiconductor intellectual property (SIP). Virtual Chips was acquired by Phoenix Technology, which later became inSilicon, which after a successful IPO was then acquired by Synopsys for $64 million.
In 1997, Simon joined Ambit, as GM of Europe. Ambit invented timing driven synthesis software. Ambit's product, BuildGates could synthesize 100K gates of logic at a time, while contemporary tools only handled around 10K gates. With chip sizes reaching a million gates this productivity benefit was very important. The European region was very successful for Ambit and it was acquired by Cadence in 1998 for $280 million.
After the Ambit acquisition, Simon became fully immersed in his new venture Co-Design Automation. He raised the initial funding round of $600K from several Silicon Valley angels including Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. Subsequent rounds of investment came from VCs and corporations including Intel Capital, Redwood Venture Partners and Altera.
Co-Design's operations were based at multiple sites (Oxford, UK, East coast and West coast of USA) where the key personnel were located. Most of the founding team had worked together before so the trust and common working methods were inherent. The company was set up to develop a new simulator solution for hardware and software design, and verification. To enable the new simulator architecture a new language was required and Co-Design's innovative hardware description and verification language (HDVL) was called SUPERLOG, which was an evolution of Verilog and attempted to work with all legacy IP. There were five other competing solutions, and Co-Design knew it was going to be a major challenge to get theirs adopted as a world standard. The Co-Design team focused particularly on marketing, coming up with two complementary strategies. They attended numerous conferences, exhibitions, and sat with standards bodies, analysts and journalists, propagating their messages. The second part of the strategy was to develop a partnership network, with leading platform companies like ARM.
After much soul searching Co-Design decided to donate their language to Accellera (an EDA standards body), with a plan to make money selling the simulation and verification tools based around SUPERLOG.
The finale came when Accellera adopted SUPERLOG as the preferred hardware language, evolving it and calling it SystemVerilog. During this time Co-Design was successful in getting design wins for its new language and simulator and the combination of user adoption and industry standardization resulted in Co-Design being acquired by Synopsys for $36M in 2002.
Davidmann is deeply passionate about design language issues and has co-written a book about SystemVerilog and its use in increasing the productivity of very large chip design. He shares his expertise of start ups, growth issues, mergers, acquisition, cross-Atlantic funding and marketing, in his non executive positions at a couple of EDA startup companies, as well being a visiting professor at Queen Mary College, University of London.
In the next issue, to be published ahead of the annual EDA event, DAC, The Chilli will speak to Simon Davidmann to discuss the challenges for EDA startups working across multiple offices, stock options, strategy for successful acquisitions and offers pertinent advice for tech entrepreneurs and advisors. Click here.
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