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PCBD-May2016

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52 The PCB Design Magazine • May 2016 No doubt about it: DownStream Technolo- gies co-founder Joe Clark is an EDA veteran, with a history that dates back to the very begin- ning of EDA tools through the merger madness of the late '90s and beyond. I sat down with Joe during IPC APEX EXPO, and asked him about some of the changes he's seen, and the direc- tion of DownStream as it enters its 15 th year. Andy Shaughnessy: Joe, why don't you start off by giving everybody a real quick background about yourself and DownStream? Joe Clark: I actually began in EDA with a com- pany called GenRad, or General Radio, which manufactured automatic test equipment (ATE) for verifying PCBs. The application there was mostly for functional testing. We created a PCB simulator to simulate the board and test if, for a given set of inputs, the outputs were correct. From that we ventured into simulation tools for DownStream: What a Long EDA Trip it's Been custom components as custom ICs started to make an appearance in the market. I went to work for Racal-Redac in the late '80s and early '90s before I moved to PADS Soft- ware, where I spent 10 years of my time. There we merged with Innoveda, which was formerly Viewlogic, and from there we spun out in 2002 to create DownStream Technologies. Shaughnessy: And 2002 was a great year to launch a start-up. Clark: That's a very good point. When I think about how long we've been doing DownStream it seems like it was only a couple of years ago, but it has been 15 years. When we spun out, it was really a bad time: The tech bubble had burst and then there was 9/11 and all the ter- rible things that surrounded that. It was just a bad time in general. Our view was the EDA industry up until then had focused primarily INTERVIEW

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