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.
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Very sorry to hear about Richards passing and thanks for making his contribution known. There are not enough Richards in this world.
Richard was a genuinely warm and wonderful individual. He was also a good friend to many of us and a great colleague. Thank you for sharing his contributions.
Thank you for this piece Colin. I was saddened to hear about this news. I always enjoyed working with Richard. He was very kind, considerate and professional. He’ll be greatly missed.
Thank you for the great piece on Richard. I’ve known Richard since 1979 and just learned of his passing yesterday. My kids grew up with occasional visits from Richard over the years, and he always kept them in stitches with his stories (of which he had many, most of which were probably terribly inappropriate for the kids, but that was Richard). Richard seemed cut from cloth of a different sort. He was brilliant and seemed fearless in any endeavor into which he plunged. He seemed to have the enthusiasm of a little kid and was curious about everything. Though we didn’t see one another often, I treasured his friendship and loved the emails out of left field that showed up from time to time. I know Richard would want people to celebrate his passing as yet another wonderful excursion into the unknown, a place in which he always seemed perfectly comfortable. So long brother traveler.
I just found out and feel sorry to hear about Richard. He hired me for my first job at Mentor Graphics almost 10 years ago. It was great working with him for almost a year. He was a kind mentor.