Verific Chip Design Viewpoint

0805Viewpoint.doc

Keywords: Tools (EDA), software components

@head:Component Software Accelerates EDA-Tool Development

@text:A new phenomenon is spreading throughout the electronic-design-automation (EDA) tool market. It won’t solve 65-nm problems. Nor will this phenomenon accelerate a designer’s productivity by 10X. As a matter of fact, most end users won’t notice the change. Still, it will have (and already has to some extent) a profound impact on the way that EDA tools are going to be built.

What I’m talking about is the growing market segment of EDA component software. Essentially, EDA software components are pieces of EDA applications that are common among many applications. They can be acquired rather than developed from scratch.

Some software components are already well accepted. Many have a significant market share. The first one that comes to mind is the FlexLM suite--a standard among EDA tools for software licensing from Macrovision Corp. The beauty of such a component is that it saves the EDA developer time, effort, and development costs. Plus, the end user is already familiar with it. In the early days, EDA companies might have had to write a chapter or two on its license manager in the user manual. Nowadays, a manual simply refers to Macrovision’s latest documentation on FlexLM.

Some of the EDA component software is in the public domain. In addition, some of this software isn’t limited to EDA. Few individuals won’t use Tcl as the command line interface of a new EDA tool. For development in the polygon arena, OpenAccess appears to be an emerging platform. Still others are commercially available for language-based design. They can save an EDA company many years of work.

Aside from the immediate benefit of time to market, one must consider the significant cost of support in initial product releases. For example, an aspiring entrepreneur had a business plan that quoted three months for the development of a Verilog front end. Professor Kurt Keutzer of the University of California at Berkeley told that entrepreneur that he could expect to be debugging his Verilog solution for an additional two years.

Thankfully, EDA software components can take away certain barriers to entry. An engineer who has a good idea can now focus his or her attention on that problem instead of wasting time on language parsing, timing analysis, schematic generation, and the like. The result is a level playing field with other EDA companies targeting this market segment. For instance, a company that wants to compete in the logic-synthesis market--be it ASICs or FPGAs--has to have Verilog and VHDL support on par with industry leaders.

Even though the EDA-component-software segment is still in its infancy, its numerous benefits extend beyond time, effort, and development costs. In fact, I believe that this segment could spawn a whole new industry of EDA professional services. Such services would be similar to those found in the customer-relationship-management (CRM) and enterprise-resource-software (ERP) space.

Once upon a time, EDA tools came with their own hardware. The industry made a big leap forward when software and hardware were uncoupled. The catalyst, of course, was the entrance of competitive (and competing) workstations. I believe a similar inflection point is now upon us. If we can provide competitive (and competing) EDA component software, the EDA community will have tapped into that source. The end user--chip designers worldwide--will be the winner, as EDA tools will be cheaper, more reliable, and delivered more quickly.

Rob Dekker, President and Founder, Verific Design Automation, Inc.,