by Max Maxfield Over the years (actually, decades, now I come to think about it), I’ve seen a lot of great silicon chip architectures and technologies pop up like hopeful contenders in a semiconductor Whack-A-Mole competition, only to fail because their developers focused on the hardware side of things and largely relegated the software — in the form of design, analysis, and verification tools — to be “something we’ll definitely get around to sorting out later.” Of course, these companies did eventually cobble some low-level software tools together, something sufficient to allow them to talk to the hardware, but these pseudo-tools could be used only by the designers of the chips themselves because no one else could wrap their brains around how the little rascals (by which I mean the tools, not their creators) performed their magic. Thus, even when these companies had working silicon in their hands, they still didn’t have real-world tools that could be deployed to and employed by their customers. As a result, these companies quickly faded from the collective consciousness like “dust in the wind,” as progressive rock band Kansas sang on their 1977 album