By Mike Gianfagna
Growing up in New York City leaves lasting memories. The coming holiday season evokes some strong ones. The Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center is an example. Christmas always seemed to radiate in all directions from that huge tree perched above the ice skating rink behind Radio City Music Hall. And then there was the ball dropping on New Year’s Eve in Times Square. For the most part, New Yorkers don’t understand time zones on that evening. Midnight in Times Square ushers in the New Year for the entire planet, at that instant in time, period. All these memories are colored with a combination of fantasy and reality.

As New Year’s Eve approaches once again, I begin thinking about the future. What will 2012 bring? Will the economy continue to mend? What will the presidential election mean to all of us? These are important questions, but I would like to focus on something closer to home: What will the EDA landscape look like in December 2012? OK, not as lofty a topic, but nonetheless important for at least some of the readers of this blog. I would like to make some rather bold predictions that have a helping of both fantasy and reality. This seems appropriate for the holiday season. Here we go…

Foundry consolidation will certainly continue to occur. Will we be able to count the number of companies building 45nm and below material on one hand? And if that consolidation continues, what will become of the business we currently call “mainstream EDA?” Today, the mainstream of EDA is defined by the tool chain that starts at logic synthesis and ends at mask data preparation. That tool chain is getting more focused and tuned to the manufacturing process every day. So, what if there are only five or less process targets? Is that really a market, or simply another opportunity for consolidation?

I see consolidation as a distinct possibility. With that in mind, here are my “predictions” for what the EDA landscape will look like in December 2012:

TMSC will buy Synopsys and spin out everything above logic synthesis, forming New Company No. 1.

Not to be left out, GlobalFoundries will acquire Cadence and do the same thing. Now we have New Company No. 2.

All this M&A activity will attract a group of “EDA insider” private investors to pool resources. They will collectively decide that it’s time to do an EDA roll-up. That roll-up will include select parts of Mentor Graphics, as well as a few other small EDA firms. New Company No. 3 is born. As part of that transaction, the remaining foundries will bid against each other to acquire the Calibre business from our investment group, and that one will be fun to watch. Who will win? It may not be TSMC or GlobalFoundries.

So who are the Big Three in EDA when all this settles down? It’s a different landscape for sure. Who knows what the names will be, but EDA will be different and hopefully better. Better in the sense that the focus will now be on higher levels of abstraction, an area that could find new customers and new budget. I’ll be the first to admit that these predictions are a bit “out there.” Recall my comments about blending fantasy and reality. The logic that leads me to these outcomes has holes—quite a few, in fact. Regardless, all of this *could* happen. I’d like to hear your views on the subject.

In the meantime, have a great holiday season. If you work in investor relations at Synopsys, Cadence or Mentor, don’t wander too far from the telephone though.

–Mike Gianfagna is vice president of marketing at Atrenta.

By Mike Gianfagna
The Design Automation Conference is almost here. That major focal point for the EDA industry where we gather to explain the present, predict the future, have a bunch of serious meetings and maybe a little fun, too.

Some companies will stage an incremental update of their strategy and others will outline a major new strategy. This year, Atrenta will be talking strategy, with some announcements and a whole lot of demos to back it up. We’ll talk at length about SoC Realization—the part of the SoC design process that sits between system level design and silicon implementation. Pictorially speaking:

We’ll also have a little fun. For the first time, we have a trailer for DAC and a spokesperson, of sorts. If you have a little over a minute, check out this video.

I digress, this is starting to sound like a sales pitch and that’s not the point. The diagram, above, borrows a market segmentation that was originally proposed by Cadence a little over a year ago in their white paper entitled “EDA360, the Way Forward for Electronic Design.” One can certainly debate some of the concepts in that white paper, but the basic premise that SoC design is composed of a system design component, a silicon implementation component, and a piece in the middle that ties the two together does make a lot of sense.

Silicon realization is what pays the bills at most EDA suppliers today. That’s where the heavy lifting of synthesis, place & route, extraction, verification and tapeout occurs. It’s also an area that has become highly competitive and which is seeing some consolidation. We’ve all heard the refrain – chip complexity is going up and tapeouts are going down, as are the number of foundries in the world. Does this mean that someday there will only be a few monster chips being built by a few foundries? That’s quite unlikely. The market will find a way to differentiate.

Re-use will help, especially as we move from IP re-use to subsystem re-use. New technology advances like 3D stacked die will also help. The complexity of these new SoCs, or whatever we will call them, will demand design at a higher level of abstraction. It will simply be too hard to design any other way. So, the regimes of system realization and SoC realization will become the new battleground where end users compete for the next big thing.

But what about the foundation of EDA—what about silicon realization? Let’s start with an observation. Silicon realization flows are becoming more tuned to the target process. That tuning involves implementation flows that are lithography- and variability-aware, among other things. So the question is this: If there are to be only five (or fewer) foundries in the world, why don’t they each just buy a silicon realization flow and take it in-house? That will result in a well-calibrated, predictable and robust path to silicon. In that world, old EDA becomes part of the manufacturing process, and new EDA becomes, well, something else. It’s time for a new name.

–Mike Gianfagna is vice president of marketing at Atrenta.

By Mike Gianfagna
The EDA360 White Paper that Cadence Design Systems published a few months back certainly has everyone talking. It’s well written. The messages are compelling. The content has a viral quality. The printed collateral is visually appealing. The microsite is engaging. Most of us only wish we had the marketing budget to do this kind of stuff.

A healthy marketing budget is a necessary but not sufficient requirement to communicate a compelling vision, however. You can have Bill Gates-class money, and if you don’t have a good idea, it just doesn’t matter. What I want to focus on for a moment is the other side of the buzz. Everyone is talking up EDA360 – interpreting its message, endowing it with all kinds of subtle, and not-so-subtle implications. Here is one person’s view of what EDA360 is NOT:

Let’s start with the obvious. EDA360 isn’t a recipe for struggling startups to find liquidity. The vision is bigger than any one company, especially a small one, to accomplish. Apologies to the venture community – EDA360 isn’t a way to find a quick exit.

EDA360 doesn’t define the rules for a new board game, although that actually might be fun for the nerds among us.

EDA360 isn’t pure Cadence marketing hype. OK, some people think maybe that’s exactly what it is. Here is a test – if you were going to use a high visibility platform like this to promote your company’s products and direction, wouldn’t you make sure the message lined up with what you were offering?

So, take a close look through the EDA360 document. See anything in there that looks like a current Cadence product – maybe even a roadmap presentation from last year or something like that? You’ll find yourself stretching here.

Here’s my favorite one – EDA360 isn’t a template for your company’s new brochure. You don’t take the document’s message, copy all the figures, and say “me too.” That’s IP reuse taken too far. The vision behind EDA360 requires a new approach to design methodology and customer acquisition. It demands a fundamentally new approach to the market and a collaborative attitude to get there. “Me too” doesn’t work.

So what is EDA360? It represents a lot of ideas, strategies and predictions. For me, the most compelling piece is access to new customers and new markets. Let’s face it, EDA has been stuck in the same demographic for a while now. As an industry, we’re good at figuring out how to win existing budget from a competitor but not so good at finding new budget. EDA360 proposes there is a new demographic – the software development community who writes code for consumer products.

These folks typically live with the hardware they get and do their best to make the software work on it. The semiconductor and EDA communities think this is just fine. After all, we’re at the center of the universe, right? The arrows always radiate out from what we’re doing.

What if we decide the arrows are pointing in the wrong direction? What if the software development community drives the hardware architecture? That would make for a very different design methodology, one with a new source of potentially unambiguous specs. In this upside-down world there might be new customers, new budget, and a process to define multiple hardware variants in a new, market-driven manner. Not bad.

Making the arrows point the other way won’t be easy, conquering new markets never is. I, for one, am excited by the prospect. If we can all stay focused on this goal, maybe EDA can start growing again. I look forward to that reality.

–Mike Gianfagna is vice president of marketing at Atrenta.