Comments on: EDA is DEAD

By: Dan Nenni

Dan Nenni — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 04:40:25 +0000

I agree 100%. Silicon waste will continue and it’s the consumers that pay the ultimate price.

D.A.N.

By: abc

abc — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 04:28:31 +0000

Hi Dan,

You are right EDA is dead. Today no VC in the valley will fund a new EDA company and it is highly unlikely that they will fund a semiconductor company.

Teams get by using old methodologies and old tools. Synopsys adds hacks to VCS to generate incremental revenue from customers.

Younger engineers won’t touch EDA and where are the new ASIC designers. Certainly no in the Vally.

Where are the university professors that are championing new tools? Not at Stanford or Berkley.

This industry was killed by sales and marketing machines which were out negoiated by semi company business people who had the likes of Andy Grove lomming over their shoulders demanding that they drive a hard bargain.

Who are the real losers?
The engineers and the semi companies. You get what you pay for. They will pay for not supprting the EDA industry with lower productivity using outdated tools and methodologies. What do the companies do instead of supprting innovation in the EDA space? They ratchet up the pressure on the engineers and demand longer hours and destroy lives.

By: Google versus Synopsys (EDA) « Daniel Nenni

Google versus Synopsys (EDA) « Daniel Nenni — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 02:15:25 +0000

[...] Leave a comment Go to comments This Blog is a follow-up to my ever popular declaration that EDA is Dead. I know comparing Google to Synopsys is apples and oranges, or more appropriately comparing apples [...]

By: Gary Dare

Gary Dare — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 21:23:07 +0000

Hi, Kevin! The great recession of the past two years, and the so-called recovery from the 2001 tech crash (at least for high tech) that crawled from 2003 through 2007, has not helped EDA nor (more importantly) its customers, the systems and chip houses. Start-ups are the main source of innovation in EDA but VC has been frozen in place, affecting EDA start-ups worse than fabless semis. Two successful acquisitions that happened in this decade (I’m sure there’s a couple of others) were Synopsys taking Synplicity on a late stage exit and Mentor Graphics taking Lighthouse (formerly Silicon Forest), creators of the inFact verification technology. I fear that the dry pipeline for EDA may be even drier as we wake up in a recovery.

By: Gary Dare

Gary Dare — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 20:55:18 +0000

Rich and Dan,

A year or two ago, there was a mock documentary called ‘A Day without a Mexican’ to outline the role of latinos (some possibly illegal) in low wage labor. Maybe the EDA industry can launch a PR campaign called A Day Without EDA to emphasize the contributions of CAD to the electronics design industry!

Imagine one scene where a couple of chip designers attempt to transcribe a gate layout on graph paper into an Excel spreadsheet, coloring sets of columns and rows … (can I claim the copyright on that scene?)

By: Gary Dare

Gary Dare — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 20:48:41 +0000

A great essay, Min! Your analogy on the EDA business model might be further qualified to that of enterprise software companies, such as SAP or CA. However, EDA is more specialized to maybe a couple dozen large enterprises worldwide but many, many SME’s (small to medium size enterprises). It is not general software that is scalable, so it is difficult to do the same with pricing and that creates difficulties for customers who are SME’s including fabless chip start-ups.

Providing customers with the capability to do their own customization, rather than put that burden on the EDA supplier (and secret keys to unlock custom features), brings up an issue on the customer side: are they willing to provide their own resources to carry out such customization (scripts, plug-ins, IP-XACT generators using that standard’s TGI, etc.)?

By: Kevin Cameron

Kevin Cameron — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:29:23 +0000

Not dead, just moribund. I would say that EDA has not been adapting to changes in technology and economics (that have been fairly predictable), and has failed to innovate. At this point a bottom-up rebuild of the tools is possibly required, e.g. most of the tools from the 90’s know little about power management, multicore or DFM.

I suspect major consolidation is in the offing, and if EDA tool availability/pricing is getting in the way of building working Silicon I think the actual Silicon-vendors may step in to provide the tools (as the FPGA vendors do).

By: xyz

xyz — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:52:25 +0000

Dan is right about all this. EDA is Dead.
I’ve worked for a couple of different semiconductor companies over the years and have seen several trends that work against the EDA business.

#1 FPGAs have killed ASIC starts on the low end
#2 many ASICs have been replaced by general purpose CPUs with some well-tuned firmware
#3 the old tools from the 1990s were good enough. why should i buy new ones (or different one).

I think there is always opportunity for Design Automation tools, but in the chip business, EDA is pretty much a solved problem. So its time for these EDA companies to move on and look at other industries that could benefit from design automation tools.

By: Matt Rhodes

Matt Rhodes — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:14:12 +0000

Dan, Exceptions to every rule: Atoptech is finding a seam in a flat to declining market. Smart,experienced teams committed to innovation find a way.

By: Min

Min — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:46:46 +0000

I’m not a veteran as other people who commented here. But I agree with you Dan, the traditional EDA is dead! The problem is that the EDA companies are using the traditional business model of software companies. Developing software that satisfies “general needs” and customization for individual customers. This customization is either done by the EDA company itself or by customer themselves. However, the EDA market is special because the user of the software are pros in the field. They are usually the EDA department in the design houses, and they worked on the particular field for years. So they know exactly what they want and they know exactly how they can get what they want. As the result, the development team of EDA company is constantly asked for special customization and eventually comes up with a huge pile of features which has to use a very complex sales model to get the money. Effectively, EDA companies are fighting the trend of customization in some way instead of embracing it. IMHO, customization should be in the heart of EDA company’s R&D effort. It should change its focus from big unified flow or platform into flexible customizable feature offering, and so its products should be marketed and sold this way.