July 26

SSTA adoption to be slow

Statistical static timing analysis methodology is the hot topic in EDA, but customers it will likely be "some time" before customers adopt it, according to Ed Wan, senior director of design service marketing at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC).

"Do we believe SSTA is real?" Wan asked. We believe it enough to put it on our reference flow. That's not something we do lightly."

But, Wan said, SSTA is "something we need to push customers to adopt."

TSMC's reference flow 7.0, announced last week, includes SSTA support from several vendors.

Nvidia: Thumbs up on AMD-ATI

Some at DAC may have been too preoccupied to realize that Advanced Micro Devices Inc. confirmed Monday that it has an agreement graphics specialist ATI Technologies Inc. for about $5.4 billion.

The event did not go unnoticed by Chris Malachowsky, co-founder and senior vice president of engineering and operations at Nvidia Corp., a chief ATI competitor. Speaking at the EDA Consortium event Tuesday (July 25), Malachowsky whole-heartedly applauded the move.

"From my perspective, it's the best thing that ever happened," Malachowsky said. "We are not the sole surviving GPU company."

Malachowsky added, "We offered them [ATI] a need to take a new strategic direction, so they found one."

Malachowsky said Nvidia will continue to support all processors.

Max does DAC and paints

Programmable Logic DesignLine Editor Clive "Max" Maxfield has created a blog to describe his day-to-day DAC movements. We are impressed with his painting ability. Check out: http://www.pldesignline.com/blogs/index.jhtml#191100343

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July 25

Mighty Spirit

Maybe it was just the promise of free cocktails, but more than 175 people turned out for a Spirit Consortium meeting Monday evening.

Ralph von Vignau, president of the Spirit Consortium, told attendees that, after initially envisioning a two-year lifespan for the consortium when it came together in 2003, Spirit plans to stick around to provide further technical specifications for integration of multi-vendor design flows.

Vignau announced that the consortium has been incorporated in California as a non-profit mutual benefit corporation. He also unveiled Spirit's snappy new logo and said it has changed the name of its specification to IP-XACT.

Take the heavy attendance and apparently sudden explosion of interest in Spirit to mean that the pain of integrating multi-vendor flows continues to be felt.

City government in action

San Francisco is pulling out all of the stops to recognize the 43rd DAC. Mayor Gavin Newsom filmed a videotaped welcome to DAC message last week, and the city proclaimed Tuesday "DAC Day."

"On behalf of the city and county of San Francisco, I am proud to welcome the 43rd Design Automation Conference to San Francisco," Newsom said in a written proclamation. "In recognition of DAC's 40-year commitment to advancing technologies to enable electronics products of all kinds, I do hereby proclaim Tuesday, July 25, 2006 as Design Automation Conference Day in San Francisco."

Top that, San Diego.

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July 24

Attendance up?

Organizers of the 43rd Design Automation Conference said that, as of 2 p.m. Monday (July 24), more than 6,895 attendees had registered for DAC, up 20 percent from the number of registered attendees at the same time last year.

Expectations have been that the conference will draw more than 11,000 during the week.

Where new EDA leaders will come from

In his latest EDA Market Trends report, Gary Smith, chief EDA analyst at Gartner Dataquest, wrote that growth in the EDA industry will be stalled until "new leaders emerge." At a panel presentation at the Design Automation Conference, Smith had a few things to say about how that might happen.

If we are to see new leaders emerge, Smith said, it will most likely happen in electronic system level (ESL) design. He suggested that several companies might come together, in the way that ECAD, SDA Systems, Tangent, and Gateway combined to form Cadence Design Systems in the 1980's.

"If Magma could get this damn [Synopsys] lawsuit off their backs, they're going to go out and do an acquisition spree and do what Cadence did," Smith said.

A second possibility is that several design for manufacturing (DFM) providers could build a company. A third is that several analog/mixed-signal providers could merge. He suggested that observers "follow Jim Solomon and Jim Hogan around" and see what boards of directors these EDA veterans are on.

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July 23

IP theft paramount

Aart de Geus, Synopsys Inc. chairman and CEO and also chairman of the EDA Consortium, got the ball rolling Sunday evening (July 23) with a brief intro on the consortium's benefits. Opening the 18th annual Gartner Dataquest Executive Briefing on the eve of the Design Automation Conference, de Gues highlighted a number of issues facing EDA, including intellectual property protection.

"There are Web sites where software made by anyone in this room can be ordered, almost for free," de Gues said. "And by the way, it's very recent software."

Later, de Geus showed a chart depicted revenue by EDA and semiconductor intellectual property vendors over the past several years, jokingly adding that you have to look closely to see that revenue has been growing.

"The EDA industry can be viewed as lousy because it's flat, or it can be viewed as very stable compared to our customers."

In-house tool use on the rise
Gartner's chief EDA analyst, Gary Smith, had some sobering news for EDA vendors. While praising EDA for keeping the cost of IC design stable for the past 10 years, Smith also said that use of internally developed design tools by IDMs is on the rise.

Last year, Smith sounded alarm bells by reporting that the results of a Gartner Dataquest survey showed that 28 percent of chip designers were using at least some internally developed tools. This year, he said, a similar survey revealed that that number has grown to 38 percent.

Giving it away

Smith also had some harsh words for leading programmable logic suppliers Xilinx Inc. and Altera Corp. The companies' strategy to give away FPGA synthesis tools "drives me crazy," Smith said.

Smith, a former semiconductor industry executive, said one of his former companies was forced to stop making design tools for customers after investors raised a red flag over the money being spent on the project.

"I can't believe the investors aren't going to someday look at that [Xilinx and Altera's design tool development] and say, 'Why are you developing these design tools,' " Smith said.

But, he added "I've said that for the past 10 years, and they aren't listening."