  Once in a while you run across an interesting web-site, that while probably not of too much use to those who are deeply familiar with a particular field, might be of quite some use to those in adjacent and related fields. Let’s face it, for most design engineers it is very difficult not to get pigeonholed. That is, we are very familiar with the particular tools that are required for us to perform our daily job, but our knowledge of tools that another horizontal group in the organization might be using is very limited. It becomes even worse when one works for a company that mostly utilizes internal tools, for then you might become completely oblivious to what external tools in your field of practice might be capable of. Even if you make the effort to learn about some of the external offerings, you might get as far as the big three (Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor), and have no idea about all the startups that are working on new and innovative tools. Well, as it turns out if you are interested in electronic design automation (EDA), you might be in luck, for there exists a website called Demos On Demand, that features a generous amount of videos from a myriad of EDA vendors.
The presentations are organized into several high-level categories such as front-end, back-end, low-power, manufacturing and so one. Under each of these categories one can find further sub-categories to ease the search process for videos of interest. The site also features interviews with what it labels as experts, which most of the time turn out to be the founders of particular companies. It features a few training tutorials, however these are very limited, so one is probably better off going to a particular company’s website for help and tutorials. The seminar selection is nominally better, although a few more would not hurt. From the startup perspective, the most interesting section is hands down the featured startup section under featured content. There, one can find a list of descriptions and videos for 25 or so startups in the EDA field. Now, I’m no EDA expert, but several of the companies on the list have been acquired by now, so it might be that the site’s content might be a little dated. Also, don’t expect any in-depth content in the videos; they are more or less technical marketing sales presentations for a company’s product. One annoying thing is that one needs to login to view the full video content. Creating an account in itself would not be much of an issue if the account creation worked properly that is. I had serious issues logging-in after creating my account. Nevertheless, as a springboard for finding out about some of the EDA startups out there this site is a decent start.
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Blogs 
