One of the nice things about being part of a website such as SemiWiki is that you get to see real-time trends and analytics. SemiWiki is built on top of a relational database with a full content manager and integrated analytics. It also allows us to see historical data that we can compare and contrast to what is happening today.
One of the more interesting trends that we see is acquisitions involving the companies we work with. For example, the following SemiWiki subscribers have been acquired over the last two years:
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If you take a deeper look into this trend you will see the common thread of Dr. Paul McLellan. Paul worked closely with all five of these companies and provided expert coverage based on his many years of experience in the semiconductor industry.
Dr. Paul McLellanhas a 30 year background in semiconductor and EDA with both deep technical knowledge and extensive business experience. He works as a consultant in EDA, embedded systems and semiconductor. Paul was educated in Britain and spent the early part of his career as a software engineer at VLSI Technology both in California and France, eventually becoming CEO of Compass Design Automation. Since then he was VP engineering at Ambit, corporate VP at Cadence, VPs of marketing at VaST Systems Technology and Virtutech, and interim CEO at Envis Corporation. He blogs at dac.com and at semiwiki.com and has published a book EDAgrafitti on the EDA and semiconductor industries.
Looking forward, here are the other companies that Paul works closely with on SemiWiki:
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Based on the analytics of this blog we can then rank the above companies based on who will be acquired next and by whom, pretty cool huh? That’s the difference between a Web 2.0 site like SemiWiki and a dusty old HTML gossip website. Seriously, when was the last time you went to the library and used a card catalog to find something?
Take a look at the SemiWikiMergers and Acquisitions Wiki and see the colorful history of EDA acquisitions. Look at the bottom of the page and you will see that almost 20,000 people have viewed it thus far. Just to make things interesting, place your best guess in the comment section on who will be acquired next and by whom. Winners will get some SemiWiki swag.
Next Generation of Systems Design at Siemens