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: Where will the growth come from in EDA? Will it be integration or traditional EDA tools?
Hand: For us it will come from two areas. One is the underlying IP. The second is the integration. Those are both potential growth areas. If we don’t address those, the other stuff doesn’t work.
Gianfagna: A lot of this IP exists today, so if you’re going to re-use it you’d better have a good methodology and documentation for your IP and a good repository. And you better have a front-end tool to help you assemble it. All of those things exist in 3D. They’re just more complicated and the stakes are higher. But the benefits are higher.
Hand: Very few companies use these capabilities today even for a single chip. You need to spend time up front trading off the various IP implementations, and then you need to track it throughout the design.
Teng: 3D stacking will compress the growth for EDA. The whole chip will become more complicated. It’s more than a human being can comprehend.
Hand: But complexity has exploded over the last 20 years. EDA hasn’t.

SLD: What does EDA look like five years out?
Hand: The way we see it is a top-down approach. There will still be the existing class of tools. But in addition to that there will be new tools to address SoC integration. And beyond that is the true system analysis, which is more on the software side.
Teng: Software will play a more important role. In addition, different companies will have to work together to develop solutions.
Gianfagna: It will be a completely different industry in five years. To use the Cadence terminology, if you look at the silicon realization piece—which is the physical implementation through the back end to the foundry—well, you can count the number of foundries on one hand. And each foundry will have its own optimized back-end process to do silicon realization for that process. That means all the back end will be bought up by the foundries, and there will be a new EDA industry that will include everything before that. And there will be a new set of problems that includes IP re-use, assembly, 3D planning, analysis of a 3D stack, and integration at a higher level. The whole EDA industry makes a sharp left and the stuff that pays the bills today becomes a captive technology inside of the foundries.
Hand: Even if it isn’t captive, it’s not a growth engine. But if we don’t address the challenges design starts continue to decline and fewer and fewer companies can afford to do chips.

SLD: Will startups drive EDA growth?
Gianfagna: If you follow it back to the money, I don’t know of an investor that will put down money for an EDA startup in the United States. That’s not true in Europe and Asia, so maybe the industry growth shifts there.
Teng: Asia is not putting money into EDA companies. There are not many companies there.
Gianfagna: But will it change?
Teng: Possibly. Our company is based in Taiwan.
Hand: But it may not be one or the other. It may be a living ecosystem, with the larger companies making these changes to enable customers. Once customers have this fundamental enablement they can start to work at that level of abstraction. Then startups can begin working on those problems. Now, if you’re a startup you can’t innovate because of the complexity. But if we can compartmentalize the problems, then that creates an opening for startups.
Teng: I agree with that. If there’s an opening then smaller companies will build on top of that.
Gianfagna: There’s no emotion here. It’s all about return on investment. If there is a return then the money will come back into EDA.
Hand: Unless the customer can change the way they design as a starting point, then it’s going to be hard to build those capabilities.

SLD: Will the balance shift to software owning hardware or vice versa?
Gianfagna: I think software will drive hardware in the future.
Hand: The software drives the problem. Whether they own the problem remains to be seen. If we don’t give visibility into the problem, then it becomes a purely software-driven problem and a lowest-common denominator for the hardware. That would be a loss for the whole industry. If you’re forcing everyone into commodity and the price becomes exorbitantly expensive, then you start to limit innovation across the board.
Gianfagna: The world will not be homogenized. If you do, someone will figure out a way to differentiate. For many years the hardware guys drove the train and the software guys were along for the ride and trying to figure out how to get this all to work. That’s changing.
Hand: I think it’s already changed.
Gianfagna: I don’t agree with that because I don’t have a clear example yet of a software team driving the hardware architecture.
Hand: But they do define the feature set, which defines the hardware spec. Years ago we built the chip and the software guys utilized it as best they could.
Gianfagna: But what ultimately could change the industry is when the software guys are not simply specifying what they need and are active participants in the design process.
Hand: It’s starting.
Gianfagna: It is, but it’s not all the way there. That’s where the growth is.

SLD: Does that redefine what EDA is today?
Gianfagna: Yes.
Hand: Absolutely. Very few people, when they think of EDA, think about integration and software challenges. There are two ways EDA can grow. One is to convince existing customers to buy more tools. The other is to fundamentally change something so more companies build stuff. If you can change the cost of design and it’s not as hard to build a chip, that’s not necessarily bad. If you can double the size of the market, then you can grow. Now you sell more tools per design start, but the number of design starts is going down because the complexity is going up. Just to keep even you have to get more out of each design.
Gianfagna: That’s going to be important. Otherwise you’re in a death spiral.

Tags: Atrenta, Cadence, EDA, Springsoft

This entry was posted on Friday, April 15th, 2011 at 7:55 am and is filed under Round Tables. 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.