Engineers sought by Synopsys, other local firms; win a Porsche!

Electronic News, August 10, 1998 by Jeff Dorsch

Well, Synopsys and 113 other local companies, in fact, including one outfit which is dangling $5,000 finder's fees and a grand prize of a Porsche Boxster convertible for referrals. But over the past decade, the Synopsys Austin office has grown from one person to more than 60, and they are definitely hiring.

The Synopsys Web site last week listed 42 job openings in Austin -- the company's largest number of openings at one location outside of Silicon Valley. (Corporate headquarters in Mountain View last week had 218 openings available, and a separate facility in nearby Sunnyvale had 44.)

The Austin openings are for field applications engineers, sales engineers and design consultants. Mike Hancock, the Austin-based director of the Southern area for Synopsys, said selling engineers on relocating to Austin isn't a hard task.

"Austin's a terrific place to live, to raise a family," said the Synopsys executive, whose territory stretches from coast to coast, from Southern California to North Carolina and Florida. "It's pretty easy to get a guy to move (here) from Boston or Minnesota or even California."

Among other attributes of the lushly green Hill Country of Texas, housing prices here are highly reasonable compared with California and the Northeast. There is no state income tax in Texas, although property tax rates on homes are often double the California rate -- but then again, property prices and values are usually much lower than the Golden State, especially in the hyperactive real-estate market of Silicon Valley. And, of course, Austin is "The Live Music Capital of the World," where you can rely on having someone apply their musical talent to guitar strings or a keyboard while you enjoy your Sunday brunch of migas and a latte.

Design consultants in Synopsys' Professional Services business work from a different approach than those at Cadence Design Systems, according to Mr. Hancock. "We kind of do it different than the Cadence folks," he said. "We would rather do 'insourcing,' working with customers, rather than Cadence-style outsourcing."

Synopsys design tools, especially the logic synthesis software, have become so widely used that consulting clients are usually seeking ways to optimize their use of the tools, rather than to have Synopsys take over their design projects, Mr. Hancock noted. This is where Synopsys design consultants typically come in.

Austin is becoming known as a town for microprocessor design, and this is helping drive the growth of the local Synopsys office from its present employment level of 60-70 people. Mr. Hancock was the one who opened the Austin office 10 years ago, back when Sematech was still setting up its semiconductor manufacturing R&D facility south of Town Lake.

Cadence, the No. 1 company in electronic design automation (EDA), hasn't failed to take notice of Austin's attractions, either. Last spring, the San Jose, Calif.-based EDA software vendor and consulting services leader selected the capital of Texas as the site for its consolidated customer support center (EN, May 25), drawing in support personnel from around the country. The new Cadence Austin facility will also house a branch of the Spectrum Services consulting organization, including a cadre of processor designers hired away from Digital Semiconductor just before the Intel takeover this year. Those engineers were working on the StrongARM processor for Digital, and Intel has had to resort to establishing an all-new StrongARM design team in Austin.

And the International Cadence User Group will hold its annual conference in Austin next month, Sept. 13-17 at the Hyatt Regency Austin, right on Town Lake. Keynote speakers will include Cadence president and CEO Jack Harding and executive VP K.C. Murphy. For more information, visit the independent user group's Web site at http://www.dacafe.com/USERSGROUPS/Cadence.>So if you ever thought of working for Synopsys, don't automatically think of Mountain View or the Valley. That job at the No. 2 EDA vendor just might be in Austin. Check their Web site at http://www.synopsys.com.