A legacy of innovation in Electronic Design Automation spanning over three decades
Genashor was started in August of 1988 and then incorporated in 1990 by three people: Gary Gendel, Aaron Ashkinazy, and Yefim Shor. The name is a mashup of our last names - (GEN)del, (ASH)kinazy, and (SHOR). Our purpose was to develop and sell unique and exceptional EDA tools for integrated design.
Innovation from the Ground Up: While the Genashor team brought decades of experience from MIMIC and RCA, Simic and all other Genashor tools were complete "start from a blank sheet" designs. These weren't simple continuations of RCA work - they were revolutionary new implementations that achieved dramatic performance gains. What took MIMIC hours to simulate, Simic accomplished in seconds, with enhanced functionality and even greater accuracy.
Aaron and Henry teamed in the mid-70s to develop the next generation logic simulator for RCA. Their "discussions" were infamous within RCA, but the result was a simulator with capabilities and accuracy far beyond anything else. A naming contest was held in RCA and MIMIC (Module Imitating Integrated Circuits) was born.
In 1981, Gary joined to convince the consumer divisions of RCA to use MIMIC instead of breadboarding. After working with designers for 6 months, almost every design using MIMIC created working silicon on the first attempt. This success led Corporate to ban breadboard design entirely.
When asked if the individual programs could be tied together into a push-button process, the answer was yes - it just needed glue software. Six months later, RCA created the ASIC division using this setup for external customer designs with an unprecedented guarantee: if MIMIC said it would work and it didn't, RCA would pick up the cost for fixing it. From the start, we achieved a 98% first-time silicon success rate.
Gary Gendel was awarded the David Sarnoff Award for Outstanding Technical Achievement for his pioneering work on MIMIC. This prestigious recognition was the last technical award given by RCA before the company was acquired, making it a historic acknowledgment of MIMIC's revolutionary impact on the integrated circuit design industry.
Gary became part of an industry-wide Design Automation group comprised of IC design and fabrication companies and emerging EDA software companies, each helping contribute to the industry's success. This group spawned the first Design Automation Conference.
He was also part of the government's initiative to standardize a design language. After several rounds of competing proposals, the group developed what became the VHDL language.
GE bought RCA, and we weren't allowed to expand or replace any employee that left. With just 14 people, we were completing a new design every week.
When GE sold us to Harris Semiconductor, we were up to a new design a day supporting over 60 companies around the world. Harris invested heavily in Cadence and didn't see the value in our software. The plan was to replace our software with Cadence within 8 months.
We immediately went from a new design a day to no designs in 6 months - our existing customers weren't happy about the announcement. We were still using our ASIC software 2 years later when they closed our doors. This gave way to the birth of Genashor Corp.
To keep cash flowing while developing products, we did contract work with Valid, Mentor Graphics, AT&T, IBM, and others. The work ranged from software for the inside trading group for a bank in NY to designing complex communications chips.
We designed the most complex of the "7-sister" communications chips for Marconi using Simic. It worked first time. None of the other 6 chips designed by separate design houses worked, so we ended up re-designing them all without a single failure.
In 1992, a student in England, Shiv Sikand, posted in a usenet group asking for a power consumption analysis tool. Gary responded with our Xpower tool. Shiv was working on an asynchronous (clockless) design of the ARM processor.
This started a two-year collaboration where Genashor developed and provided tools and expertise for no charge. Gary and Shiv met at the Async Design Conference in 1994 in Utah. After graduation, Shiv moved to California and worked for Hal Computers and Silicon Graphics, each time contracting Genashor to write software for them.
Aaron and Gary ended up consulting for the David Sarnoff Research Center and decided to become employees, so they closed Genashor but continued to provide full support for customers.
About a year later, Shiv approached Gary to be part of a new company he was forming - IC Manage. Gary became a founder and Aaron joined the company. The rest is, as they say, history.
Achieved and maintained an unprecedented 98% first-time silicon success rate with our ASIC design tools.
At our peak, Genashor products were used at over 60 sites around the world.
Contributed to the first Design Automation Conference and the development of VHDL.