By Ed Sperling
System-Level Design sat down to discuss the future of EDA with Neil Hand, group director for product marketing in Cadence’s new business group; Mike Gianfagna, vice president of marketing at Atrenta; and Johnson Teng, COO at Springsoft. What follows are excerpts of that discussion.

SLD: What does EDA need to address that it hasn’t addressed so far?
Hand: EDA traditionally has worked bottom up, and for some problems that works well. But that isn’t always true. Verification is causing a huge explosion in design effort. We haven’t solved that yet, but in the meantime software has become a huge problem and now integration is becoming a problem. We can’t move quickly enough with the bottom-up approach. That’s why we’re starting to look at a more top-down approach.
Gianfagna: Another side to that question is whether EDA is stuck serving the same customer base with the same budget and the same problems, versus finding new customers and expanding the business. That’s one of the things that’s wrong in EDA. As an industry we’re not good at acquiring new customers. We’re all good at fighting for the same pie but we’re not good at expanding the pie. Software is a new challenge. Maybe we need a different approach to verification and a different methodology.
Hand: Part of the reason for that is we look at it from the standpoint of how we go after a new industry, not how we should look at a design problem. People in EDA talk about how we use technology and expand into an adjacency. Even within our existing base we’re not asking questions about what customers need to do design.
Gianfagna: It’s different versus better. Those aren’t the same thing.
Teng: We do have new problems, but the old problems still exist, too. The question is where we’re going to add value for customers. There are new areas like IP and system-level design, but even in verification and closure we have to make sure it’s complete and that all the EDA vendors can work together on this because customers continue to pick best-in-class tools.
Hand: But even if you make verification two times faster, that’s not enough. It’s a huge effort, but the problem is growing faster than that.

SLD: One of the complaints by large companies is that EDA companies aren’t investing in technology to solve the really big problems. Is this the same problem?
Hand: There are going to be two approaches in design. One will be from companies doing front-to-back design. That’s going to be a fairly small subset, though involving very large companies. The problem is too big for most EDA companies to solve, but it’s also too big for most customers—even with better tools.
Gianfagna: To move from an authoring to an integration flow requires massive retooling and changes in the way things are done by the customer. Most customers are very unwilling to make those changes. Does EDA have to lead that charge? My sense is yes, but most EDA companies are viewed as followers rather than leaders by their customers. That’s a problem. As an industry we should be more than a supplier. We should be a partner to our customers.
Teng: I don’t think any single EDA vendor can solve their customers’ problems. It requires the whole EDA industry. We need an open environment so customers can pick the tool to solve their problems.

SLD: Companies in this industry aren’t known for cooperating with each other, yet you’re asking for a tight ecosystem play. So what do you do?
Hand: If you look at this from a customer perspective you can start to define new ways in which the tools and the industry need to work together. If everything is homogeneous, that’s not going to happen. But if you define better points of integration and implementation, it’s easier for companies to work together.

SLD: But that raises issues about who’s liable when something goes wrong, doesn’t it?
Hand: Even today you have those problems. Was it a problem with the tool vendor or an internal one?
Teng: That’s right. Customers have to do integration. Fortunately Cadence introduced OpenAccess and now everyone can write to that open standard.
Gianfagna: The software guys have built a scalable infrastructure. You’ve got middleware, the OS layer, and everyone knows who does what. EDA doesn’t work like that. EDA is like software was in the 1960s. There were one or two players that wanted to own the whole thing.
Hand: The embedded space was like that until recently, as well. Now it’s a more scalable model.
Gianfagna: If software does start to drive hardware, does the embedded software educate the EDA market or does the EDA market begin to corrupt the embedded software world?

SLD: What happens with 3D stacking? This is the coming storm in EDA. Do the tools get used the same way?
Hand: If 3D becomes a technique for system integration and you’re using a class of tools to create known good die, then it does open up new markets. Right now it’s all about new ways of building chips by the same companies. If it becomes a tool for a new class of company where they integrate on the chip rather than in the system, then it opens new opportunityies.
Gianfagna: It also creates more design starts and, hopefully, a more vibrant semiconductor business.

SLD: But most of this seems to be heading toward re-use of older chips and analog IP.
Hand: Yes, but that does create the opportunity for a new class of design.
Gianfagna: There’s a supply chain challenge along with that. Who will be the general contractor? Who takes the inventory risk?
Hand: And who does the integration and confirms it’s going to work? Known good devices sometimes aren’t all that good once you put them into these 3D stacks. So who’s liable in those circumstances?
Gianfagna: I like to think it’s going to open new markets and new opportunities.
Hand: The challenge is coming up with integration-level tools. We’re not there yet.
Gianfagna: If you think about the way the EDA business is growing, it’s growing around the edges rather than in the middle, and more at the front edge. What that means is if you’re going to do a single chip you can battle it out and get it right. For 3D it’s a need to have. There’s a natural focus on the need for more tools and technology. That’s a growth opportunity.
Hand: And there’s lower risk. If you can get more re-use then you have re-use that is lower risk. Ultimately it will lead to die-level re-use.

Tags: Atrenta, Cadence, EDA, Springsoft

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 31st, 2011 at 12:01 am and is filed under Round Tables, Technology Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.