In the June 29, 2008 blog entry in this space, entitled, “Will the ‘Big 3’ EDA Vendors soon become the ‘Big 2’ ??”, we commented on the bid by Cadence to buy EDA rival Mentor Graphics. See http://cofes.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/272/EntryID/142/Default.aspxWell, it looks like the ‘Big 3’ will be around, at least for awhile.On August 15, 2008, Cadence finally grew tired of the effort and called off its $16 per share ($1.6 billion) bid to acquire Mentor.Shareholders immediately expressed their opinions of this news. Shares of Cadence surged 7% during the August 15 trading session to close at $7.64 a share, while shares of Mentor tanked, falling 26% to close at $10.33.From the June 29 blog entry, readers will recall that Mentor had immediately rebuffed Cadence’s original $16 a share offer. In any case, industry insiders say that since then, Cadence was having trouble obtaining reasonable funding terms for the more than $1.1 billion needed to do the deal, a task made more troublesome after Cadence lowered its 2008...

CAD helps us express our ideas.  Next, CAD will help us have ideas. CAD will proactively prompt inventing and innovating.

Inventing means designing (described by regular COFES participant, David Ullman, P.E., Ph.D., and CEO as "the elaboration of information punctuated by decision).

Innovating means helping others appreciate and leverage your design.

As a VP at 3M noted, Invention turns money into ideas. Innovation turns ideas into money.

Our understanding of the fundamentals of both has increased considerably in this decade through research on how we think, c.f., "The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities" by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. 

Now we can harness the advances in digital electronics, software and social dynamics to take design to the next level. Challenges of extent, variety and ambiguity needn't bother us any more. 

 

At http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/07-08GreenLightProj.asp you are forewarned that the information technology industry consumes as much energy and has roughly the same carbon “footprint” as the airline industry. Then you can read what UC San Diego is doing.

Too many special interest groups have camped-on to this bandwagon. For COFES purposes, which sustainability are we addressing (or should we be addressing)?

One in five German manufacturers pulling production out of China:On August 4, 2008, Germany's Der Spiegel reported that "China lost its status as the world's cheapest country for manufacturing some time ago." Now momentum is "shifting away from outsourcing to the Far East, with one in five Germany companies pulling production out of China."Chinese workers, they say, are getting too expensive. Many German companies cite "fast-climbing labor costs and pesky production quality problems" as reasons they are either "searching for countries with lower wages [or] returning production to Germany." Hans Röhm of the consulting firm Deloitte said that "the companies that are most likely to return to Germany are those that outsourced production out of cost considerations -- including the consumer goods industry and textiles, which both produce in mass quantities." However, "German manufacturers of high-quality goods are also looking at China with a more critical eye," according to Der Spiegel. "A dip in quality for these...

On August 1, 2007, the entire span of the Minneapolis Interstate 35-W bridge over the Mississippi River collapsed, with numerous fatalities and injuries, a disaster later reportedly traced to an original engineering design flaw in the gusset plates connecting the underpinning beams. (Over the months since, corrosion and rust have also been cited as possible culprits). Back then, the 35-W collapse was discussed in several blog entries in this space.The Missouri Department of Transportation recently released a report that raises further concerns: One out of every four bridges now in use in the United States is classified as “structurally deficient,” just as the I-35W bridge was classified before it failed. That’s about 152,000 bridges, and counting. Within the next 15 years almost half of the US bridges will exceed 50 years of age, beyond the life span for which they were designed. Even now, 20% are already over 50 years old. Fixing every US bridge flagged with structural issues would cost at least $140...

In the June 29, 2008 blog entry in this space, entitled, “Will the ‘Big 3’ EDA Vendors soon become the ‘Big 2’??”, it was parenthetically mentioned that MCAE vendor ANSYS was in the process of absorbing EDA vendor ANSOFT.On July 8, we reported that ANSYS had received SEC clearance for the ANSOFT acquisition on June 23, 2008, and that a special meeting of the ANSOFT stockholders to approve the transaction had been set for July 23, 2008.Well, the deal is done! On July 31, ANSYS announced that it had successfully completed the acquisition of ANSOFT in a series of mergers for approximately 12.2 million shares of ANSYS common stock, including 1.9 million shares pursuant to assumed stock options, and approximately $387 million in cash, plus expenses, using a combination of existing cash and proceeds from approximately $355 million of committed bank financing to fund the transaction.Dr. Zoltan Cendes, founder and Chief Technology Officer of ANSOFT, will become a Chief Technology Officer with ANSYS and member of the ANSYS...