标签: Prakash

In part 1 , Prakash Narain, CEO of Real Intent, related his early career and the primary steps that prepared him to start his own company. Then in part 2 , we talked about the early days of Real Intent and the impact that the dotcom boom and bust had on developing technology. At the end of the last segment, Narain talked about Real Intent's success with implied intent verification, but he wondered if it was a distraction from its broader goals. Now read on. Prakash Narain : What we were looking to pursue didn't materialise in the form we wanted, and we realised that our goals may have been a little too big. At the same time, success had materialized, and this became the way we were able to sustain ourselves. After that, we built our clock domain crossing tool, but in those days, there was not a big market for it. We still held the dream of building an automated, scalable, formal verification solution and helped drive standards we thought were necessary, such as SystemVerilog. There came a point where we decided that the combination of things we were trying to put together was not viable, so we had to make a choice. The choice was should we build highly complex systems, or should we build products that were scalable, lower-touch solutions. This changed us from being a technology-focused company to being a product-focused company. We would develop whatever formal technology was necessary to solve specific problems. EE Times : Do you think the original goal would have been realisable under ideal market conditions? Narain : We went away from the goal because we don't believe that it was realisable. Under perfect conditions, with the knowledge that I now have, I would have made course corrections earlier. I would have been less married to the technological concept. I now believe that it will never be attained, and that formal verification will only complement simulation, not replace it. Static applications provide a lot of value, but they are only part of the solution. EE Times : Designs these days are based on IP blocks that combine existing content with a small amount of new content. Does this change your strategy going forward? Narain : There is an evolution in the methodology. As I mentioned , the value of an engineer is in bridging the gap between what we have and what is to be attained. In the past few years, the size of designs has doubled, and this will happen again. There has been improved resolution in the verification characterisation problem. I call these the known unknowns—things such as the CDC problem, cache coherency problems. If solutions are known, static solutions are always superior to dynamic solutions, and there is a new set of static solutions that is emerging, and we are targeting a set of those. Then there are the unknown unknowns, where simulation still plays an important role. The increasing complexity has created new failure modes, such as needing multiple clock domains, so new opportunities are always arising, and static tools are capable of solving some of these. EE Times : What is the next chapter? Narain : Right now, it is about completing the endeavors we have picked up. We are making some new bets, and hopefully this time with better wisdom, but the focus is on execution. For the future, opportunities come, but you don't know when. Right now, I am focused on the challenges in front of me. EE Times : Do you ever regret having gone into EDA? Narain : No. Hindsight is always 20/20, but you have to take responsibility for making the decisions and accepting them. I have learned not to be married to anything—well, I am married to my wife and very committed there. Water flows and finds its own level, and I have learned to change my thinking based on new information. In the final part of this CEO profile, Narain talks about the larger challenges and opportunities facing the EDA industry. Readers, how many people are now using formal technology in some way to solve their verification challenges, and what other problems do you wish formal verification could solve? Brian Bailey EE Times  

In the first instalment of this CEO portrait, Prakash Narain told me about his early career and the primary steps that prepared him to start his own company, Real Intent. EE Times: What was the prime motivation in starting Real Intent? Was it the technology, or was it building a company? Prakash Narain: I took many of the steps of my career driven by intellectual curiosity. I had not focused on management aspects and was never a manager. I knew the opportunity that I wanted to pursue, but discovering how to do that was learning on the fly. The challenges were enormous at that time, because nobody wanted to work in EDA. This was the dotcom boom time. I had to learn how to sell the concept to people to make them want to work with me. So I had to build a team, and I had to build a product. I was not ready to be the CEO, even though I carried the title. I made it clear to investors that the company needed to hire a CEO, and I started to approach people that I thought could run the company, but they were looking for other things during those times. So I was the CEO because of the circumstances, as well as leading the technical direction of the company. EE Times: So I presume that you grew into the role? Narain: Yes, I have grey hair and lost hair along the way. You can never plan every aspect of your life, and there were a series of steps in front of me that I had to navigate. I don't regret any decision that I made. There was a lot to learn, and with learning, there are always mistakes, but I am very comfortable with where I am. And while investors may claim to be mentors, they are really only driven by return on investment. It is the responsibility of the CEO to understand all of the complexities that are involved. You cannot assume away a reality, and investors may give you good advice, but it may not always be right on the money. I did learn from advisers, but it was bits and pieces from many people and not a lot of meaningful guidance. The timing of when I started Real Intent had positives and negatives. It was during a time when it was easy to raise money, but it was a lot harder to execute. Real EDA advancements do not take place in the lab. You can create a prototype, but the advancement gets made when you start an engagement—partnerships with customers. By the time we had our first product, we were faced with the dotcom bust. Companies were shutting down, and everyone was worried about their jobs. Few people were interested in something new or dramatic. We were told that we were facing a nuclear winter, and that we should hunker down and survive. We did, and because it had been so difficult to hire, we didn't have too many people and didn't have to let go of people, but there was no momentum, and we didn't have an opportunity to validate the original concept. EE Times: Tell me about your first success—the first time you managed to start working with a customer. Narain: The first product we built was actually an accidental discovery. We wanted to build a formal verification solution, and to test the concepts, we had built an automated method of generating verification targets. David Styles, a member of our technical advisory board, was the CTO of Siara Systems, and we asked him to try a few things. With the first design they ran it on, they got some strange results, and it turned out to be a problem in the design—discovered right after they had taped out the chip. That became our formal implied intent product—now Ascent IIV. Our first real customer was Nvidia, and they thought Real Intent had really hit something with the product and should run with it. But I wanted to challenge simulation, and this felt like a distraction. In the third part of this portrait, we examine what happened that changed Real Intent from a technology-focused company to one that concentrated on products. In your opinion, do engineers make good managers or CEOs? How many engineers who have become managers long for the days when they had their hands in the pot? Brian Bailey EE Times

Prakash Narain completed his undergraduate work at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and always had an interest in pursuing further studies in the US. Narain got to the US in 1986, and studied computer architecture, VLSI design, algorithm analysis, and programming at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The confluence of a bachelor's degree in electronics and a master's degree in algorithms led Narain to EDA and, with some prodding from Jacob Abraham at The University of Illinois, Narain found himself doing a Ph.D. in test under his guidance. Narain says he still finds EDA to be complex, fascinating, and intellectually satisfying but at the same time a little painful. From high-level algorithms targeting gate-level test, Narain's thoughts turned to functional test and this was the starting point for his interest verification. At around the same time, equivalence checking was making its first breakthroughs, particularly in programs inside IBM. This is where Narain got his first job, although still in the area of test. Unfortunately the Endicott region in New York where IBM was had no employment opportunities for Narain's wife and so they moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and he got employed by Advanced Micro Devices in its EDA group. This was a change from everything being done using internally developed tools at IBM to work based on third-party tools and commercial languages such as Verilog. Narain's thinking started to range widely from synthesis, to simulation, from RTL entry to silicon. Narain says: "Through all of this I wanted to understand the user's perspective. I wanted to understand why one option was better than another. I didn't have that perspective and I needed to build it. What were the constraints on the customers that we were trying to serve?" Then an opportunity came seeking Narain and he moved on to a microprocessor design project at Sun Microsystems. He came to realise that engineers are the people who fill the gaps between the tools and between what needs to be done and what the tools can do and this requires a lot of creativity. For Narain, that completed the cycle from algorithm developer, through tool and flow development, and on to being a tool user. At this point, I will let Narain tell the story in his own words. There was still a hunger to do something new, something different. At each step in my career I had moved outside of my comfort zone and moved into a new space where I was not the big guy on the block and had to invest in myself. I decided to leave Sun and move back into EDA. A combination of youthful exuberance, ego, a sense of preparation, and a belief that I was good at what I did led me to think that I would be successful. But I was naive—you need more than that. The combination of my background and my experiences led me to a perception of opportunity in verification. We started with the idea of building a scalable, automatic, formal analysis solution that would be very valuable and would be able to dominate the simulation market. Now remember, this was also the dotcom days when everything seemed possible. I felt that it was the right time in my life to do something, to start my own company and that company was Real Intent. In the second part of this CEO portrait, we will explore the early days of Real Intent and how the company evolved over time. Meanwhile what has inspired you or made you want to start your own company? Is it technology or business? Brian Bailey EE Times