Michelle Clancy, longtime president and CEO of Cayenne Global and marketing leader in the EDA sector, was selected as the 2022 recipient of the Marie R. Pistilli Women in Electronic Design Award, a prestigious annual honor that recognizes individuals who have significantly helped advance women in electronic design. The award is named for the late Marie R. Pistilli, co-founder of DAC, who placed a high value on equality, diversity, and acceptance.
For more than 25 years, Michelle has contributed time, effort and insight into EDA companies and the DAC itself. In her roles in corporate and most prominently as president of Cayenne Global, Michelle has been passionately dedicated to helping scores of EDA and silicon ecosystem companies grow and succeed. She has communicated compelling, engaging stories about the vital benefits of design automation. Additionally, as a volunteer, she’s worked tirelessly to promote, expand, evolve and improve DAC for more than 20 years. In 2018, for such efforts, she was honored with the Distinguished Service award from the ACM/SIGDA, of which she is a member.
“I’m truly honored to have my name associated with Marie Pistilli, a woman I admired and worked closely with for many years to create programs and events within DAC to celebrate women innovators,” Clancy said. “This year’s honor recognizes the contributions that so many non-technical women make to the advancement of EDA and its businesses. What we do in marketing is the second phase of innovation: Engineering creates the products and solutions, but that’s only the beginning of the process. Products aren’t successful unless customers learn about them and their potential to change their business. That’s what we all help create in the second phase of innovation – awareness and adoption.”
Michelle began her EDA career in the 1990s, as design automation was fast accelerating as a crucial and growing enabler of electronics systems. She soon found herself building marketing and communications campaigns for some of the biggest companies in the business, during the golden age of EDA. Among her early achievements was being a key member of the marketing team following the merger of ArcSys and ISS, that branded Avant!, as a leading EDA firm in the sub-nanometer era. Michelle was an integral part of the product-marketing team that helped weave in the products and technologies. This included place-and-route technologies that became Apollo and its Star RC extraction tool (now Synopsys), that is now the EDA industry’s gold standard for parasitic extraction. Next came, launching Mentor Graphics’ Calibre product, which became the de facto standard in DRC/LVS.
In 1998, Michelle took her passion for marketing technologies and nurturing companies into the agency world, joining Cayenne Communications (now Cayenne Global). In 2005, she took the helm of Cayenne and since then, she has worked with more than 80 companies including the major technology innovators in the EDA, IP, and semiconductor industries and recently expanding into AI and embedded markets. She has supported her clients to build awareness of their products, presence at events and hone their messaging to position themselves for growth, IPO or acquisition. Over the years, her success has stemmed in large measure from her ability to help “translate” deeply technical product details from the front end of design to the back end into memorable campaigns and communications that help drive companies’ business goals. As she built on her early successes in a largely male-dominated industry at the time, Michelle focused much of her attention on finding ways through internships and hiring to expose young women to the technology industry.