Richard Vlamynck RIP

I recently celebrated 30 years of service with Mentor Graphics. I actually joined Microtec Research in 1986, which was acquired by Mentor a decade later. Over the years, I have met many interesting people. In the early 1990s we acquired a company called Ready Systems. One of their staff stayed the course and I have worked with him from time to time over the years; his name was Richard Vlamynck. In recent years, he has been a very welcome guest blogger here. Unfortunately, we will hear from him no more …

I was very sad to receive this message from his colleague Aaik van der Poel a couple of weeks ago:

It is with extreme sadness that I come to you to let you know Richard Vlamynck very unexpectedly passed away last Saturday.

Over the last 8 years that I had the privilege to work with Richard, I have come to appreciate and respect him greatly for his tremendous sense of humor, professionalism, sharp wit, passion, willingness to do whatever it takes to get it done, and done right, and extreme high curiosity quotient.
He was always looking for new angles and never afraid to tackle new, very complex things.
He would make them his own and be proficient in them in no time, so he could support others on the matter at hand.
No task was too great or scary for him.

It did not scare him one bit when he took on all the technical pre- and post-sales support of all the Soft IP cores when Mentor stepped away from that business in 2008.
During the first weeks of that closedown he dove right into a very messy situation with a vendor tape out, working with the vendor and its customer to help assess and interpret the test findings and performance measurement. His contributions led to an amicable resolution between all parties involved.
Later he helped broker a deal with a vendor that obtained the source and base of that very same design to rollout their own products. This required Richard to single-handedly dive in the full design process of this complex chip, bring it up in the various Mentor tools and proove that all the materials were there. This required some serious resourcefulness and patience to complete; without his tenacity we would not have closed this very large deal.
He has solely taken all the technical pre-sales calls on Soft IP since, resulting in multi-millions of dollars of sales for Mentor on these products.

He wasn’t fazed when asked to take on the post-sales support from a retiring colleague on the Microtec compilers; after all he had implemented the VRTX operating system on customer projects since 1991.
In true Richard fashion he was working with customers in no time to get them up and running when they were stuck and down.

His keen interest, practical experience, and background from his consulting days in Hardware/Software embedded design served him well in answering platform question for the Agility business Mentor acquired 2009. It wasn’t long before he was upgrading customers to the Seamless HW/SW co-verification system if the boards did not meet their needs.
Richard was one of the very few people I know that mastered the whole platform design, making HW talk to SW and using test and measurement equipment to debug these systems.
He loved his time in the field supporting the Celaro and Ikos emulators during the turn of the century.
His passion was obvious when he wanted to acquire the test and measurement equipment from Mentor out of his own pocket when that became available in the 2008 IP division restructure.

I will miss that passion, his associated humor and contributions immensely.