Judge hears technical testimony at Avanti hearing

Judge hears technical testimony at Avanti hearing
SAN JOSE, Calif. — The People vs. Avanti restitution hearing closed its third week on Tuesday (July 3) with Judge Conrad Rushing hearing technical testimony from Avanti Corp. witnesses who questioned the value of the code Avanti executive Stephen Wuu stole from Cadence Design Systems Inc. in 1991.

The highlight of Tuesday's session featured evidence presented by Deputy District Attorney Julius Finkelstein, who tried to drive home the fact that the criminal restitution hearing must end with Judge Rushing ordering Avanti to pay Cadence for the losses Cadence suffered as a result of Avanti 's theft of code it then used to build a competing product and place and route franchise.

Avanti's defense team argued that Avanti should only pay Cadence the value of the stolen Symbad database software code.

When cross-examining former Cadence and Avanti employee Michael Stabenfeldt, Finkelstein presented a side-by-side comparison of Cadence's original Symbad database code next to code found simultaneously on a tape that held the stolen code and Avanti's place and route products.

Finkelstein's presentation outlined in red Avanti database code that had a one-to-one correlation with Cadence database code. He showed thumbnails of the entire presentation with a majority of the 50-plus-page document covered in red. The deputy district attorney then showed specific segments of the code, emphasizing one particular spot where Avanti failed to omit the use of "ECAD," Cadence's previous product name, in one line of its code.

Pointing to the presentation, Finkelstein asked Stabenfeldt for his professional opinion as a tool architect as to whether he thought Avanti wrote the code that happened to match the Cadence code simply by coincidence, or if he thought Avanti copied the code.

"It's too close — this definitely looks like stolen code," Stabenfeldt said.

Stabenfeldt was originally called to the stand by Avanti's defense team to back ongoing testimony from Chi-Ping Hsu, member of Avanti's technical staff, that database technology is another type of "support code" and simply a small and fairly insignificant part of a place and route system.

Stabenfeldt, now a consultant and editing tool vendor who works mostly with Avanti customers, said he was the seventh employee of ArcSys Inc., which merged with Integrated Silicon Systems Inc. in 1995 to form Avanti. Stabenfeldt testified that he developed layout editing technology at Cadence and then moved over to ArcSys to develop support code for the ArcCell product, including database technology. He testified that at the time he joined ArcSys in October of 1991, the company, founded in February of 1991, already had much of the database completed, and that Stephen Wuu had been in charge of developing the code up to that point.

Finkelstein then showed the progress log for the ArcSys database code that the district attorney's office seized from Avanti in its December 1995 raid of the company's headquarters. The log showed that the database code grew from a few thousand lines to roughly 47,000 lines in 18 days. Stabenfeldt said that amount of code would be extremely difficult to generate in such a short amount of time, given the resources ArcSys had at the time.

Stabenfeldt also testified that he benchmarked or knew of benchmarks in his stint at ArcSys in which ArcCell beat out Cadence's Cell3 software at three customers, and lost to Cell3 at one other customer. In all cases, testified Stabenfeldt, customers did not base their decision to buy or not to buy the software on database performance.

That backed a point that Hsu made in his testimony, which is expected to continue this week, that place and route technologies and not supporting database technologies are foremost on the minds of potential place and route tool customers and thus are the most important elements of a place and route system.

Hsu's testimony featured a list of renowned PhDs that ArcSys had recruited to develop placement or routing technologies vital to turning ArcCell into a top-flight product.

Hsu's testimony also brought forth a block diagram that showed read-in and read-out functions accounting for only a minute percentage of overall place and route run-time. But the flow on Hsu's diagram was refuted in the cross-examination of Stabenfeldt because it omitted the step of floor planning, which heavily involves database interaction.

Stabenfeldt also refuted Hsu's testimony that databases were not necessary to feed information to place and route tools. "Customers would not buy a commercial place and route tool that didn't have a database," Stabenfeldt said.

Finkelstein is expected to begin his cross-examination of Hsu next Monday (July 9). Finkelstein thus far has been adamant about proving that the database, while not being necessarily the main selling point for buying a place and route tool, is nonetheless a crucial technology — crucial enough for a company to be motivated to steal it.