EDA Consortium Annual CEO Forecast and Industry Vision
For those of you that have not heard, I have been asked to moderate the 2011 EDAC CEO Forecast. Having an internationally recognized industry blogger moderate this prestigious event is a significant milestone and I’m honored to be a part of it. I do need your help however, in coming up with questions for the CEO’s. Anything EDA, whatever is on your mind, let me know. EDAC has invited Social Media in to increase the transparency so let’s show them how it works! You can register here.
The EDA Consortium seeks to identify and address issues that are common to its members and the customer community that the member companies serve. By focusing on commonality and promoting cooperation, the Consortium augments the effectiveness of the tools, services and communications provided by its members.
I’m a big fan of the EDA Consortium, there is always free food and an open bar at EDAC events (I blog for food). The Kauffman Award is my favorite event since you get a full meal but the CEO panel is a close second. This year it will be Wally Rhines (Mentor), Aart de Geus (Synopsys), unfortunately Lip-Bu Tan (Cadence) is not available, Charlie Huang (Chief Strategy Officer) will step in for Lip-Bu, and representing emerging EDA companies Ravi Subramanian (Berkeley Design Automation).
Social media uses web-based technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogues.
Social Media is a group of Internet-based applications that allows the creation and exchange of user-generated content.
A common thread running through all definitions of social media is a blending of technology and social interaction for the co-creation of value.
Blogging has been an interesting experience for me. At first it was quite humbling since very few people read my blog. But once I figured it all out, I was amazed at the types of information I had access to. Since I own my domain, using analytics, I get to see where people come from and where they click to. I also get to see search engine terms and referring sites. My blogs on the foundry topics get the most views. Semiconductor IP blogs are also popular. EDA related blogs get the least amount of views, less than 1,000 people will probably read this blog out of 5,000+ subscribers. That really bothers me by the way.
As a result of my blog I also get calls and emails from financial analysts, investment bankers, venture capitols, and random strangers asking for information and opinion on the foundries and the semiconductor industry. When I bring up EDA however there is silence, the same type of silence I experienced with my first blogs. The semiconductor industry will grow 30%+ in 2010. Semiconductor IP will grow 30%+. EDA will grow 0%. That really bothers me as well. To toil 25+ years in an industry with no real growth for the foreseeable future. It’s frustrating to say the least.
So send me some questions for the EDA CEO’s. Keep in mind that the mission statement of EDAC is:
“To promote the health of the EDA industry, and to increase awareness of the crucial role EDA plays in today’s global economy”
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results (Albert Einstein). Lets stop the insanity and grow this industry.
LinkedIn
Date: 11/18/2010
Subject: EDA forum
I suspect the neither of the following two questions is exactly what you need for this forum, but just in case:
a) Analog layout:
Tanner have implemented some layout tools that automatically generate common centroid (and possibly more complex) matching arrangements. Should we expect such tools to become standard throughout the industry?
If so, can we expect significant extensions to the capability (e.g. matching of larger groups than pairs).
b) Real-time noise:
Most (perhaps all) present Real-Time-Noise algorithms generate the noise sequences prior to starting the runs. This means that the noise streams can take very large amount of memory even for modest-sized circuits. It also slows down the simulations, as the noise bandwidth is independent of the current operational requirements. It also places excessive demands on the skill (and possibly luck) of the designer in setting a noise bandwidth that is adequate for accuracy and yet is practical to run.
Dynamic noise generation that determines the level of the noise pulses according to the actual time step would ease (maybe even potentially remove) all such issues. Have any providers implemented (or planned to implement) such a scheme?
Regards (and keep up the good work)
LinkedIn Groups
* Group: ASIC Methodology Experts Network
* Discussion: EDA Consortium Annual CEO Forecast and Industry Vision
Hi Daniel,
Following are some questions which I could think..
1. What are the areas of innovation EDA people can bring in the area of mixed signal SOC’s having 3D structures (MEMS) and typical 2D structures of microelectronics on CMOS ?
2. What are the challenges for the EDA industry while defining a common flow/methodology for ASIC+MEMS integration on a single die for which they are putting their R&D efforts ? By now we all know that a “g” sensor embedded into a smart phone SOC will be defacto in future smart phone market.
3. How do EDA industry see the challenges posed by BASICs (Bio-ASICS) which could revolutionize the way healthcare looks in next 5-10 years. ?
Regards,
Ravishankar
Posted by Ravishankar Subramanya
Daniel, zero growth and zero foreseeable growth also means zero jobs. I have nine years of successful EDA Sales Experience and am currently looking for a new position. The job market is slow and appears to be contracting. It is so bad that several longtime EDA headhunters have moved on to different fields. I would like to hear strategies used by others to successfully transition EDA software sales experience to other fields.
Hello Daniel,
You are looking for questions for the EDAC panel. Maybe I have a few.
Your quote from Einstein is certainly right, but it also makes me wonder why the EDA industry itself as well continue to try the same thing again and again.
There is a need to change the business and the engagement models between EDA industry, the CAD groups in the IC companies and the EDA users.
But not in the Lucio Lanza way of turning everything into an IP business, nor the VC approach to ‘sell at value’, nor the current EDA industry approach to simply raise the prices on all tools, especially after acquisitions.
So maybe several discussion points:
At his ‘fire side chat’ J. Bruggeman calls upon his fellow EDA companies to ‘co-opitate’ (did I spell this right? What happened to the old ‘co-opetion’?).
What do the other big EDA vendors have to say about this ‘invitation’?
Do they consider him a ‘drowning man’ and therefore carefully stay away from him?
Or are they seriously considering his proposal to ‘stop hating each other and start collaborating’?
A direct question to the other EDA vendor reps to publicly make a statement on EDA360
Time and again the EDA industry misses to address a very large group of engineers in between the EDA industry and the EDA users – I mean the various forms of CAD organizations within IC companies.
I estimate that there are at least as many CAD engineers in the IC industry than there are EDA R&D and AE engineers – ca. 10.000.
And both sides work on similar things.
EDA works on tools/ features and want to move into methodologies and flows. CAD engineers have been working on methodologies and flows already for years out of the necessity to create flows and methods out of point tools.
So there is a great opportunity for the EDA vendors to actually cooperate with the CAD community in a concerted fashion. This is essentially not happening today, very few examples exemplify the rule.
Why does the EDA industry not see the CAD groups as their cooperation partners? It appears that they still see CAD groups as obstacles to avoid in order to approach the EDA users directly.
There are 350+ EDA companies in a $5B market. It is a flat market where 350+ EDA companies talk to the same 180+ IC companies.
Acquisitions have kept the top 3 at 75% market share for the past 10-15 years.
Do they see this as a healthy approach to their industry?
Do they see any bigger consolidations looming? (Your own blog about Magma being acquired as an example, rumors are that CDN wants to go private)
Bruggemann compares EDA often to the other software world, in this domain that have establish healthy and prospering vendor networks where bigger companies create ecosystems for smaller players and in parts establishing a tiered market where the bigger ones close the deals including OEM arrangements with the smaller players
Could the EDA industry see something similar? Or does it have to be acquisitions?
Internal R&D innovation vs. acquired R&D innovation: what is their position? It seems that most innovation is through acquisition of hot startups. How much internal innovation is really going on within the EDA companies? What do they do to foster an innovation driven culture? (example: I would venture that the majority of the CIC team of CDN deflected to SNPS since they were able to develop finally all the new things they already knew were needed and beneficial for their users but CDN mgmt did not allow this to happen).
I may still have some more and would write them up in another email if you like.
Let me know what you think about them and whether you would consider them for your session.
Thanks and good luck with the panel,
Thomas
Hi Daniel,
what I would like to know is how high can the EDA companies climb up the software chain, till they say, this is not a business for us? Mentor is offering a GUI design tool for Android (for a horrible price btw), Synopsis is hiring experts in embedded software, Cadence is talking about the apps economy as part of their EDA360 campaign. So can the participants imagine to offer drivers for their IP, whole operating systems or even writing GUI-applications running on the hardware which has been designed using their tools and with their OS underneath? Can they imagine to create whole systems for the customers as a service? Just think a bit about the future, Whirlpool comes to an EDA company and asks for help how to create fridge with internet access and apps for it? What wiil the companies be able to offer Whirlpool?
If the IC industry is growing and EDA is flat, could that mean that commercial EDA is becoming less central to the success of a semiconductor company, now that free/cheap alternatives are becoming more available?
LinkedIn Groups
* Group: ASIC / VLSI Experts
* Discussion: Bring EDA Back from the Dead!
Perhaps another way of looking at it is: for the EDA tools/companies that are doing better, what are they doing that the rest of the industry is not doing? That would give ideas on how to succeed within the existing business models.
Second, Is it possible that alternatives (like opensource) are hurting EDA tools the way OpenOffice and Linux hurt Microsoft? Microsoft has incorporated opensource drivers (from Linux) into their software products, and also moved into hardware (X-box, etc.). Maybe the EDA industry has to contemplate changing their business model?
I don’t have the information to answer the questions, but those are the questions I’d be asking, if I were a CEO of an EDA company.
Posted by Erik Jessen
Hi Erik,
I agree with your comments, an EDA business model change will definitely be required. One thing I would like to see is the big EDA companies opening up their formats to encourage outside application development. Where would the iPhone be with out the Apps? An EDA App store inside tools like Virtuoso would breed innovation and give this industry a new life!
EDA partner programs shut out perceived competition which is a mistake. Competition raises the bar for internal innovation. An EDA App store would prove this easily. It is not open source but it would accomplish much of the same thing.
D.A.N.
LinkedIn Groups
* Group: ASIC / VLSI Experts
* Discussion: Bring EDA Back from the Dead!
My personal mental model is Eclipse, IP-XACT, and if the big vendors would put just a little support into taking the OpenCores IP and getting it interacting properly within that environment, it’d prove out a system that others could then build on. There might be clumps of interoperability, driven by individual companies (ARM, Xilinx, Altera), but at least it would all be within a single framework. As time went on, one would hopefully be able to start to mix/match IP.
I doubt if they’d buy into it, but it’d be great if a small startup were funded by the big EDA companies, just to test IP interoperability (like the “plug fests”). Use the same model of confidentiality – we’ll all make a lot more money if building chips were easier.
Posted by Erik Jessen
LinkedIn Groups
* Group: System on Chip – SoC with ASIC & FPGAs
* Discussion: Bring EDA Back from the Dead!
You asked for it.
I believe that there is pent-up demand for tools that enable rapid specification, verification, implementation, validation, deployment, and support of software dependent electronic devices and systems.
It was innovative methods, standard languages, demand for ASICs, and the introduction of personal computers that propelled the EDA industry in the mid 80s through the mid 90s. The ASIC vendors all had to provide their own tools initially and many of the tasks had to be performed by the vendor. The ASIC vendors did not necessarily want to be in the EDA business so they were mostly happy to provide libraries for the capture, simulation, synthesis, and layout to their customers. The designers of the ASICs benefitted from the competition amongst ASIC vendors and the reduced risk provided by the standard methods and languages and the tools provided by the EDA vendors.
Along came FPGAs that could meet more and more of the capacity and performance requirements of the systems. The FPGA vendor’s interests related to tools is significantly different than that of the ASIC vendors. The tools provided by the FPGA vendors are part of their silicon sales strategy. They want to provide tools that produce better time to performance than their competitors. And, they do not want to be dependent upon EDA vendors. The risks related to FPGA design and implementations are orders of magnitudes lower than that of ASIC design. This has had an effect on the methods and required tools to realize designs. Few or no timing simulations are run for FPGAs. Test programs are not required of FPGAs. These changes in the methods have had a negative impact on the number and configuration of tools sold by EDA vendors.
New opportunities to revive the EDA industry exist all around the world.
Our insatiable global appetite for hypermedia everywhere all the time fuels the demand for consumer electronics. The time to market demands of the consumer electronics industry are crazy. It is the demand for time to performance that represents the opportunities for the EDA industry.
It is time to converge on standard methods, languages, and tools to produce optimal performance systems from specifications at higher levels of abstraction. We need system level profiling, partitioning, mapping, and cross compilation to a variety of different processing elements. The standardization will create demand for new tools. The EDA growth opportunities will attract investment. The standardization will create competition amongst the EDA vendors. The competition and tool sales will drive down costs to customers. Companies will invest in the methods and train their Engineers to capitalize on the capabilities as a strategic competitive advantage amongst their competitors.
We are close. The traditional 10 year cycle has been postponed by a couple of years, but we are close to another high growth period for the EDA industry.
Posted by Ken Simone
LinkedIn Groups
* Group: Top 10 EDA Problems
* Discussion: Bring EDA Back from the Dead!
My guess would be to first take a closer look at the %age of Revenue that is spent at R&D. The efficiency wave has moved from production to R&D. If individual EDA companies will want to grow, they have to support this demand for R&D efficiency (oh yes … many are paying lip-service to it). Absolute (tested-certified) accuracy combined with a flawless designflow (from design to tape-out), at the same time provide a better link with the production side for device reliability.
All this in the first place for existing technology. No doubt the upcoming 3D chip structures should create opportunities for EDA companies to grow.
Posted by Erwin De Baetselier
LinkedIn Groups
* Group: System on Chip – SoC with ASIC & FPGAs
* Discussion: Bring EDA Back from the Dead!
I have been a proponent for many years of a business model that shares the risk and rewards amongst the EDA vendors and the entities that profit from the products of the tools. In the early 80s there were more value based deals because of the uncertainty of the returns. What is interesting is that as the returns became more certain, the margins to the EDA vendors did not grow proportionally to the returns realized. The amount of money put back into research and innovation decreased as a percentage of receipts. The EDA industry depended more upon innovation from startups whose research was funded primarily by government. For many years the investment from EDA vendors, governments, commercial semiconductor & systems enterprises, and private entities has been inadequate to achieve required critical mass to sustain high growth. No single source of funding for research could or should be the only source of funding. There are success stories of productive collaboration amongst government and NGOs. I believe that more collaboration and shared risks and rewards makes sense.
Posted by Ken Simone
LinkedIn Groups
* Group: EDA expert
* Discussion: Bring EDA Back from the Dead!
The big semiconductor companies are driving the cost of design services down and requiring quicker turn times. Because of this it drives design work to offshore facilities to have the ability to maintain a slim margin to stay in business. The way back is going to take some capital, mergers along with imposing a stiffer tax on companies that utilize offshore facilities.
Posted by James Pierce
LinkedIn Groups
* Group: TSMC Connect
* Discussion: Bring EDA Back from the Dead!
The reson EDA is flat has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with marketing and differentiation. For too long, EDA has focused on price and technology as differentiators. Anyone can meet or beat price and technology is worth a 6 month advantage at best. EDA firms need to strengthen their marketing to create differentiation and absract added value. That’s the short answer.
Posted by Chuck Byers
LinkedIn Groups
* Group: Semiconductor Design for Manufacturability
* Discussion: Bring EDA Back from the Dead!
Could it be that it is a mature industry and even though new products promise improved productivity companies will not buy simply because it is not a big enough win and there is some risk associated with it and there is no room in the budget to try out new methodologies?
Maybe the necessity to develop new EDA tools to satisfy the requirements of smaller process sizes will stimulate some EDA growth. For example, more specialize design rules for layout and ways to automatically detect these rules and even automatically correct (automatically fix hot spots for instance).
It seems that small and startup companies have been the place where new technology is developed. But both venture capital and government investment have been affected by economy. I would suggest that whenever possible these small EDA companies should join together in synergistic ways.This makes the combination of the tools that much more powerful. And it also allows sharing of resources, sales, marketing, application engineers and even booths at conferences (DAC).
I am in the process of starting up starting up my own small EDA company. I plan on using a service model to begin with and transition this to selling product. The cost of the tool would be much less than what major EDA vendors charge. By providing service + lower cost + new-big-ROI-technology I hope to over come these current EDA challenges.
Posted by Larry Edwards
Hi Dan – here are some ideas for questions at the CEO forecast:
- EDA360: The concepts in this White Paper have received a fair amount of air time and discussion. Where do the panelists stand on the content? Agree, disagree, indifferent? Explain why you feel that way.
- Revisiting the bowl of dog food concept: The EDA market has been stagnant (no significant growth) for a while. One company wins because someone else loses. What are the companies on the panel doing to grow the market, as opposed to just take market share from each other?
- The number of foundries and the number of design starts are both going down. How will this impact the business of the companies on the panel?
- There seems to have been an up-tick in M&A activity in the EDA sector recently. Was that a one-time blip, or will it continue?
- Venture capital to fund EDA startups has all but disappeared in the US. What are the panelist views of this trend? Is innovation moving somewhere else? If so, where?
- We haven’t seen revolutionary change in EDA in quite a while. When will we see it again, and what will drive it?
Good luck!
Daniel,
The software industry as a whole seems to be headed to a model of cloud computing. I see very little movement in this direction in EDA, Why? IC designers have had their own server farms for years, But it seems like an EDA growth oppourtunity to offer a cloud service that would bring enormous couputing power, and license avaiavbility to the smallest (and most innovative?) design house in an on demand model.
Anonymous questions for CEOs:
a) Cadence: When can you make OA truly open source, where anyone can contribute to OA, just like the myriad of successful open-source projects? Albeit Si2 controls it, but true open-source contributions have kept the larger industry acceptance and interoperability.
b) Synopsys: Enough with the ‘inter interoperability’, ‘open systems’, etc.!
When are you *really* going to work with each other on OA (or even a modified OA) to truly inter-operate on the core tools like ICC Encounter, or ICC Virtuoso? Even if OA is not used as a ‘database’, can we at least enable binary translation? Do you think that only an anti-trust escalation or an EU commissioner can force it like it did for MSFT or AAPL? (and, oh, by the way, Wally/Mentor, when are you buying Magma?)
c) Context: One of the annoying things is the licensing models and the constant negotiations. Even if you negotiate a good price for, say, Calibre, there are so many options that you may miss out on one or the other features, or a few lines of code may be added later under a different license. This is a battle not worth fighting for either side…
Question: Most contracts out there are probably now ‘subscription-like’, yet there are constant negotiations for every additional feature. Do you think that the industry will adapt a ‘tiered subscription’ model? Essentially, like a cable subscription for different groups of channels. Once you pay, you get *access* to all those group of channels, but don’t have to pay for each piece of content (“sub feature”). This is more of a small, mid-size customer issue, not the large, corporate issues.
LinkedIn Groups
* Group: Top 10 EDA Problems
* Discussion: Bring EDA Back from the Dead!
Daniel,
I agree that it would give start-ups the chance to “build upon the shoulders of giants”
They supposedly do so already. Eg. it is possible to integrate your own toolset into the Cadence designflow. The reality: when you do this, you remain a point-tool (exchangeable with many others after a certain time, dependent on the goodwill of the giant).
Some business models that I see going into that direction:
The Spatial toolset for 3D Phyiscal modeling: http://www.spatial.com/
Open Engineering (www.open-engineering.com) has a business model that makes available complete libraries up to the source code for multiphyiscs modeling
Maybe other people can suggest other companies that do this …
Posted by Erwin De Baetselier
LinkedIn Groups
* Group: Analog Mixed-Signal and RF (AMS/RF) IC Design and Development Group
* Discussion: Bring EDA Back from the Dead!
My thinking is that the EDA companies often “miss the point” of their tools. As they are not designers themselves, they have a very narrow view of what innovation to bring to the table.
Also, any new company with bright ideas going into this area face very stiff competition from the big boys like cadence and mentor … and eventually get crushed even though the innovation is good.
Getting feedback from clients is good and all … but not a substitute for real life experience.
My guess is that we will be heading back to the days where each company has a “subset” of tools developed in house to tackle some of the problems not addressed by the major EDA tools (at a fraction of the cost and twice as effective).
Posted by Tuck Poon
Hi Tuck,
I agree completely. It used to be that EDA companies knew more technology than customer. Today customers have much more design experience and know much more. And I question the feedback customers give EDA companies knowing those EDA companies support their competitors.
Emerging EDA companies do not have the money they used to so it will be very rare that they have a happy ending. Big EDA companies are very territorial which makes the emerging EDA companies life even harder.
Hopefully this will change……………… This is one topic I will cover at the EDAC CEO Panel next month.
D.A.N.