About 220 years ago, the Industrial Age essentially accomplished its grand mission, which is augment the human muscle, augment and scale it massively, obviously. And I would say that our industry, after now 77 years of sort of Information Age, if you take those dates, has also found its mission, which is augment and scale the human brain.
Well, thanks for joining us today. Our guest today is Aart de Geus. He's a co-founder of Synopsys and he just received the very prestigious SIA's Robert Noyce Award last night. That was a dinner last night, correct?
Yes, indeed. Yeah, it was.
That a lot of people attended, I assume?
Yeah, it was pretty full.
You know, one of the things actually, I was going through the SIA site and trying to figure out who else received this award in the past, and they actually listed a lot of people, including, I think last year it went to Sanjay Mehrotra of Micron, and the year before it was Lip-Bu Tan. And of course, you know, the usual suspects: Jensen Huang in 2021 and Lisa Su of AMD in 2020. So, you know, this list of people, all familiar people. Then that got me thinking, why on Earth that somebody like you, that really the pioneer of the EDA industry, had not received the award yet? In other words, that without your EDA tools, semiconductor industry today does not really exist. Is that too far to say that?
Well, you know, the timing of those things is determined by whatever happens in that organization. You have to realize that for many, many years, semiconductors was very focused on the semiconductor companies and their leaders. And no matter what the timing is, it's always an honor. And I love the fact that you call the others 'the usual suspects' because, you know, our industry, everybody knows everybody, and yes, they are the usual suspects.
In reality, you know, just following up on what Junko said, you've received quite a lot of awards over time, over your career. And I'm, you know, like Junko, I'm surprised you didn't get this before now. But this is like one of those ones, even after you had left as CEO of Synopsys, it must really be good to have received this award, you know, capping some of the other ones you've got in the past.
Well, you make me blush now. Yeah, the reality with all of these awards, of course, it's an honor and privilege to receive them. But everything we do in our industry is the result of many people working together. And actually, I've often liked to use the terminology that in English we say, you know, success is the sum of our efforts. It's not, it's the product of our efforts. A single zero and everybody gets zero. And so the team play is not only within one's own company, it is also between companies, within the entire ecosystem. And so, you know, when one of the suspects, so to speak, gets recognized, hopefully the other suspects raise their glass too, because we all know we're completely interdependent and we've all benefited from essentially having brilliant people around us.
You know, that's a very good point. In other words, the semiconductor industry itself is kind of expanding in a way that, well, back in the days, I mean, I think you actually started your career at GE, right? In those days, GE actually developed semiconductors. Amazing, huh?
Yes, so things have changed.
But now the pendulum is swinging back. Companies like Apple is designing their own chips, Tesla designing their own chips. So things have changed. You have seen this pendulum swing one way from the other. So I thought this would be a good opportunity to talk about really the changes you have observed over the last, I don't know how many years, 50 years, 40 years, let's make it 40.
Yeah, where's the end of school? It was 50 years.
All right, so what have you seen the most notable? I mean, I'm just surprised when I read that you were with GE and they were already actually working on the design tools then.
Well, you know, it's interesting that you realized that GE was in semiconductors. Most people don't know that. And at that time, GE had this vision of the factory of the future, and the CEO of that time invested in multiple technologies, including semiconductors. And I happened to be a low-level, first-level manager straight out of school with a small R&D group at that time. And, you know, the development of synthesis, which turned out to be one of the linchpins for the future, happened there. And then 18 months later, GE decided to get out of semiconductors. And I think what they didn't like about the semiconductor industry was the high degree of economic variability. For conglomerates that was doing dividends for people and was a fantastic company at that time, but this was just too noisy, up and down. And, you know, to this day, I'm not sure if them getting out of semiconductors was unfortunate or fortunate, but we were going to be laid off. And out of that came this idea of what if we went to GE and with their support decided to spin it out, because everything was going to be lost. And we were able to do that. And so I'm proud of the fact that, you know, we never took any technology, or we actually deeply debated if it was ethical to even think about this. And the answer is, well, we did something good for GE, and in the process, it started Synopsys.
Yeah, so at that time, GE kind of realized that with semiconductors, there's a little too much to handle. It's not really the mainstream business they'd like to be in, right? So, yes, what is changing now after 40 years? What are you observing, Aart?
Well, you know, earlier you mentioned Apple and Tesla, that they have gotten into chip design. They've been into chip design for a long time already, so we're talking well over a decade. And in different ways, they have both become awesome at this. But if there's one thing that over, actually, the longer period of time of our industry, which really starts with the invention of the transistor in 1947, so that's not that much you can do compared to today, obviously. But what has happened is that every five to 10 years, there's sort of a new exponential that enters the main thrust of our industry, and suddenly it is, 'Oh, now we can do this.' And the example I like to use from yesterday was you take the transistor, 13 years later, actually, a guy by the name of Kilby and Noyce invented the integrated circuit. And one has to think how big a deal that was. We had transistors, and suddenly you can connect them into the same silicon. And a step like that then opens the horizon immensely for the future. And there have been a set of those, and they sort of layer. And so gradually, our industry becomes more systemically complex. You have to know about more things at the same time, and therefore the ecosystem around it has to really play well with the semiconductor companies and vice versa. And then there are periods where people decide, 'Oh, we want to all do it in-house,' and then there's the period when, 'Say, no, no, we can delegate it to others. We have other companies in the ecosystem that can do it.' And the best example for that is actually in the '90s, the coming about of the fabless wave. And of course, today, TSMC is best known. And it's interesting that TSMC was literally started two months after Synopsys, and we have always had a parallel path because the synthesis enabled people to go to other sources because we could automatically map into those technologies.
Oh, that's interesting, right? Because without it, they can't go outside.
They have to, yeah, right, exactly, exactly. Yeah. And so, you know, these things are sometimes they just happen and you don't notice, and before you notice, it's all there, right? And that is what is so fantastic about our industry because we have this unbelievably fast, what I like to call, technomic wheel, which is technology and economics are joined at the hip. You cannot do technology if you don't understand the economics, because you're going to go bankrupt in no time. Because you have to invest and you have to polish and tune the products until you can make money with them, and then hopefully you can scale quickly, because then you need already the money to put it back into the system and start inventing again. Yeah, so it's this constant invent, improve, invent, improve, back and forth.
If we go back in time just a little bit more, and you went from CAD to EDA, how did you make that transition? What is the story behind it?
