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As of today, nearly all the parameterized cells (p-cells) used in analog and custom IC design were written in Cadence's Skill language. Cadence has been under pressure to open Skill so p-cells can be portable to any application that runs on the OpenAccess database. That would open up an analog IC market that Cadence has effectively locked up for years.
As an exchange at John Cooley's Troublemakers Panel showed, Cadence is not about to yield. John Chilton, vice president and general manager of Synopsys' solutions group, commented that the OpenAccess database is reasonably open, but not very useful. "It would be much more interesting if Skill and p-cells were open," he said. "That's the last closed citadel in the EDA world for interoperability."
"Bluntly, that's not going to happen," replied Ted Vucurevich, Cadence CTO. "We're not going to open from a competitive point of view and say here's a free ride for coming in and trying to take over accounts."
Vucurevich noted that Ciranova last year rolled out a solution that lets users migrate legacy Skill p-cells to any application based on the OpenAccess database. "We're neither happy nor displeased," Vucurevich said. Later, Vucurevich confided that Cadence is working on a solution that will allow p-cell migration.
Cadence's Skill strategy, in my view, is a familiar one in the EDA industry: lock users in with a proprietary format to protect a near-monopoly position. It reduces the value of OpenAccess, otherwise a great contribution to industry openness. It suggests that big EDA companies are only as "open" as their bottom lines dictate.
But with the Ciranova announcement, the walls are crumbling. It looks like we're going to have a competitive analog and custom IC layout market once again. That means new technology will come into play, and ultimately technology will win, not a proprietary language.
Posted by Richard Goering on Feb 23, 2007 04:26 PM in EDA Software
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