The chiefs of EDA's "big three" held a panel session on the future of their industry at the recent Design Automation Conference in San Francisco. One take-away was that this is not your father's recession.

Aart de Geus, chairman and CEO of Synopsys; Walden C. Rhines, chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphics; and Lip-Bu Tan, president and CEO of Cadence Design Systems, were frank in their assessment of their companies, the EDA industry and the tech industry as a whole.

"This recession will result in either a giant squeeze or a massive opportunity for EDA companies," said de Geus.

Rhines concurred: "Historically, recessions have been opportunities for innovation. You can cut back on marketing and manufacturing and even sales, but design keeps going, and on the rebound it is those companies that have innovated themselves out of recession that thrive."

Cadence's Tan, a venture capitalist, said that this is not the best of times to be funded but offered encouragement to budding entrepreneurs with "the resilience of coming up with a step-function solution to a hard problem and sticking with it, and not being afraid of taking a risk."

De Geus waxed philosophical about the downturn: "I think this recession is one [in which] nobody has any idea how it will end. I do think that we are at a major 'reset' of living standards on Earth." Not only the EDA industry, but all of high tech and indeed the economy at large, will need to find better ways to deal with the global challenges that the recession has made plain, he said.

Segue to NIWeek, National Instruments' 15th annual customer and technology conference, held in Austin the week after DAC. A panel discussion on whether the industry can innovate itself out of the recession wound up asking broader questions.