On Labor day, I didn't get the day off since I was in Delhi. I had to labor, not celebrate it by eating barbecue. Instead, I ate chicken curry, naan, and fried okra at the lunch I had with Jaswinder Ahuja in a conference room. I knew he had just passed his 30-year anniversary at Cadence, which meant that he was already up to about 10 years when we would run into each other regularly last time I worked for Cadence in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and we both worked for Shane Robison, who ran engineering at the time (we were organized functionally in that era). The obvious first question is how he ended up in Cadence in the first place. He told me he was born in Delhi and spent the first part of his life growing up there (or here, since I'm sitting in Delhi as I type this). Then he lived in Chennai for five years, still called Madras back then. He studied engineering in Varanasi and then went to grad school at Northeastern University in Boston. But he was always interested in coming back to India to be near his family. He told me he avoided what people called the +1 problem back then, of "I'll stay one more year and then go back to India." He was wondering what he might do to find a job when he happened to get given a copy of India Abroad by a friend, and it had an ad for a company called Gateway Design Automation who were looking for engineers in India. But they were headquartered in the Boston area, where he was already living. As Jaswinder put it to me: So I went for the one-and-only job interview of my life, and here I am still. That one interview was with Prabhu Goel (the CEO), with Phil Moorby (the inventor of Verilog, see my post Phil Moorby and the History of Verilog for more about that story), Manoj Gandhi (now EVP of Verification for Synopsys), and a couple of other famous names. He got the job. When he got to Noida (which is a suburb of New Delhi) there were already 6 people there. They were developing Verilog models of standard parts. Prabhu had realized that they wouldn't be able to sell the simulator without models, but the models would be a sort of loss leader—Gateway wouldn't be able to make money on the models. So he had made the strategic decision to create a modeling group in India. Jaswinder was engineer number 7 in the group. At the end of 1989, Cadence acquired Gateway (and the Verilog simulator) and the team in India became the CAE division. Prabhu ran the division and nothing much changed for a couple of years. The big change was when Cadence acquired Valid Logic. The two companies were a similar size with a number of overlapping products. As is typical in such mergers, much of the time was spent on trying to merge these products to rationalize the product line, and give guidance both internally to engineering, and externally to customers, as to what the combined roadmap would be. My experience at Cadence with the Ambit merger was similar—we spent all our time on timing engine issues since both Ambit and Cadence already had timing engines, and customers wanted to know which one would "win". After the Valid merger there was a similar dynamic. For example, it seemed "obvious" that Cadence didn't need two schematic capture tools, one for PCB (Allegro Capture from Valid) and one for mixed-signal (Composer from Cadence), and a lot of effort went into merging them. Their descendants are still separate today! The merger with Valid changed the structure of Cadence and put many new managers in place. One effect of all the change was that Prabhu left Cadence in 1992 to found S&T (or Software and Technologies, to give its full name). They would be a company who would do subcontract development of software and models for EDA companies, with a mixture of development services and some common code they would own and license—such as a Verilog parser. Jaswinder admitted to me that one little-known fact, lost in the fog of history, is that he followed Prabhu and was employee #1 at S&T. However, he came back to Cadence after six months (to the day: he left Cadence on February 1st 1992, and rejoined on September 1st). He came back as the engineering manager for the organization, which had now grown to 40 people. Cadence bridged his starting date, so if you want to quibble, Jaswinder has only worked at Cadence so far for 29½ years! Cadence India started to work with other divisions than CAE, expanding to IC and PCB tools. They grew the group rapidly in the 92-96 time frame. It was a challenging time with a mixture of growing pains, but especially people leaving for other opportunities. By the mid-1990s, having an Indian development strategy became a standard part of every EDA startup's business plan, and so people who already had many years experience were suddenly in demand. Attrition was something like 30+% per year. This was also a period where all engineers with a few year's experience were in demand, and salaries were going up over 20% per year. The rupee was falling against the dollar, so this was still single-digit measured in dollars. My own experience as an engineering manager is that it is very difficult to handle the human resource issues when salaries in the marketplace are changing rapidly. New hires get hired at the market rate (sort of by definition, they don't accept their offers otherwise) but that leads to new hires being paid more than the loyal engineers who have been there for a long time, a phenomenon known as "salary compression". It is very hard to get management to commit to fix it, especially after several years of not fixing it, since an across-the-board salary increase of 30% is probably impossible financially. I went through the process a couple of times in my career. Shane Robison joined Cadence in 1996 (he would be my boss after the Ambit acquisition) and gave Jaswinder responsibility for the whole India center. Jaswinder is proud that they built up a good team in the mid-1990s, and there are many people still at Cadence from that era who have 20-25 years of experience. Today, Cadence India has four sites, totaling nearly 2,000 people. Noida is the biggest with 1150 people in 4 buildings (but they are out of space and Jaswinder said they are looking to take a 5th building). Bengaluru (Bangalore) has 750, and they moved buildings a couple of years ago. There are 100 in Pune, which is a group inherited with the Tensilica acquisition. Finally, there are 50 people in Ahmedabad, doing verification IP (VIP), a group that we purchased from Sibridge. Cadence India, on the business side, has grown very rapidly. As major Cadence customers such as Qualcomm, Samsung, Intel, Broadcom, TI, ST, NXP, Mediatek, IBM, Arm, and more have set up their own Indian engineering organizations, they have obviously needed design tools and local support. These groups are doing a lot of work with the most advanced tools—there are many 7nm designs being done in India. There is also some startup activity, but Jaswinder admitted that it's nothing compared to China or Israel. He thinks it is partially cultural, but also there are a lot of attractive opportunities to work for these large multi-nationals. It has turned out that a lot of startup activity has been to start service companies, which then get acquired when someone wants a design team that is already in place, rather than having to build one up from a standing start. Even in deep-learning, which has led to a lot of fabless semiconductor startups in the US and China, it is all software-only startups. 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