Daniel Nenni

One of the reasons I started this Blog was to justify the past 25 years of my professional life. Not a mid life career crisis, just a desire to figure out how I got to where I am today and what I want to do for the next 25 years.

What I found is that semiconductor design and manufacture is imprinted on my psyche. It’s a fascinating field that challenges my IQ everyday. When you say the word “technology” there is always a semiconductor device behind it. When you say the word “semiconductor” innovation is implied.

The term innovation means a new way of doing something. It may refer to incremental, radical, and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations. A distinction is typically made between invention, an idea made manifest, and innovation, ideas applied successfully.

Working with semiconductor companies, big and small, around the world, is an amazing experience. It’s literally a peek into the future of modern life. Now contrast that with Electronic Design Automation:

The term electronic design automation is the use of computer software reducing the need for human intervention, human sensory, and mental requirements. The purpose of electronic design automation includes increasing productivity and reducing costs, to broader issues, such as increasing quality and flexibility in the semiconductor design and manufacturing process.

In the beginning, key EDA enablers were innovative: simulation, modeling, emulation, and synthesis technologies, just to name a few. But today EDA is all about automation, and the Return On Investment of that automation is clear and calculable. Unfortunately the automation business is also a breeding ground for competition and non-scalable business models. It’s like living in a gang infested neighborhood, they operate (pillage) within their own little ecosystem rather than nurturing and growing said ecosystem. That is until one gang is strong enough to manage the ecosystem entirely and suppress innovation all together.

Iraq is a real world example. Saddam Hussein managed that ecosystem effectively until a much larger gang interceded. In the computer world there is Microsoft and Intel, and in EDA there is Synopsys. Remember the operating system war? The spread sheet war? The browser war? The micro processor war is still evolving with the embedded processor people (ARM) moving up to netbooks and Intel moving down with its own embedded processor (Atom). Intel’s purchase of embedded software giant Wind River Systems is clearly an act of war.

While the gangs busy themselves with turf wars, technology vigilantes such as myself focus on grassroots efforts to take back control of destinies and collectively out innovate the gangs. Modern day success stories include: Linux, Open Office, MySQL, and Mozilla, just to name a few.

EDA however is still in play. Innovation was funded by hundreds of millions of venture capital dollars and billions of dollars in merger and acquisitions. Those days are definitely over and clearly automation alone will not grow the $4B EDA market. But never fear, the grassroots technology vigilantes are on the way and will collectively out innovate the EDA thugs and change the way people design and manufacture semiconductor devices. The day of reckoning is coming, believe it!