The OpenWave Forum takes on Behavioral Modeling

October 26, 2009

Sherry Hess is vice president of marketing at AWR, bringing with her more than 15 years of EDA experience in domestic and international sales, marketing, support, and managerial expertise. For the majority of her career Sherry served in various positions at Ansoft Corporation including director of European operations and later as vice president of marketing. Before joining Ansoft, Sherry spent two years with Intel Corporation, where she worked in the ASIC Group and developed relationships with companies such as Bell Northern Research and Northern Telecom. Sherry holds a BSEE and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. www.awrcorp.com.

To comment or ask Sherry a question, use the comment link at the bottom of the entry.

If you’ve been reading the MWJ website these past few weeks, you’ve no doubt noticed a lot of information on “behavioral modeling” coming into the public domain.  Just this past month, the MWJ website hosted interviews with NMDG’s Marc Vanden Bosch on S-functions and David Root of Agilent on X-parameters.

During IMS in Boston, AWR interviewed Marc of NMDG and also Johannes Benedikt of Mesuro (Cardiff model) on their behavioral modeling approaches.  You can view those here:

While the concept of “behavioral models” has been around for a while now, it seems that 2009/2010 will see its coming of age.  Just a week or so ago, Anritsu showcased its behavioral modeling approach with HFE Sagl’s Dr. Ferrero bringing all major T&M players into the realm of behavioral modeling.

Understanding the power of behavioral modeling and what it can do for the designer has inspired AWR and others in / around this space to cooperate in understanding how we can ensure that the deployment/ use of behavioral models is streamlined to most benefit the customer.  What came about was the notion of the OpenWave Forum (OWF).    www.openwaveforum.org

Members of this emerging forum include AWR, Anritsu, HFE, Mesuro, NMDG, Rohde & Schwarz and Tektronix, and we encourage and hope that many more will join us. AWR’s motivation for being a founding member of the OWF is, of course, our on-going strategy to make it as easy as possible for customers to focus on design productivity. It’s refreshing to see competitors recognizing the value of working together for the benefit of all our customers.

I remember an experience back in the days when I was in sales and launching the European division of another software company. I marched into BMW HQ in Germany in the mid 1990s, determined to sell them more than the two seats they were using at the time.  At the end of the day, the engineering manager imparted these words of wisdom to me: “Sherry, I need my EEs to be designing, not drawing and doing file translation. My EEs (who were one for every 10 MechEs) are too valuable to spend their time drawing.  Enable ready import of our existing CAD files and then we’ll have something to discuss.”

For me this was a “no brainer” moment.  Anyway, I have digressed a bit but I think the point is the same. Engineers should be engineering, not toiling away on unnecessary steps like drawing a box.  We (in the collective sense of engineering tools/vendors) should be focusing on providing and differentiating our own IP and not mucking about explaining/convincing users, for example, about the benefit of dxf vs. sat file formats.  Be competitive on the subjects/technologies that matter most to the engineering community—it’s about how the models are developed and how customers’ bottom line can be improved!

If your curious to learn more about this topic, you can visit the OWF website and/or by visiting any of the other members of the OWF websites.