The biggest issue driving globalization is labor. Until recently, companies in the U.S. could rely on a ready supply of homegrown engineering talent as well as a stream of newly minted graduates from overseas who were drawn to the U.S. by the promise of opportunity and advancement. Even students mid-way through their college engineering programs often transferred to the U.S. to complete their studies, and then stayed on after graduation to contribute to the technology industry and national economy.

But circumstances have changed. Not only is post-9/11 scrutiny making it harder to attract foreign-born talent, but also many foreign countries now offer a wealth of opportunities for aspiring engineers, diminishing the appeal of a move to the U.S. for education and career. As immigration of engineers has declined, the population of engineers in North America has decreased while the availability of engineers in their native countries has increased. These trends have precipitated an entirely new environment for engineering, design, and product development. The era of globalization has arrived, and it is very much here to stay.

The most visible manifestation of globalization is outsourcing, a concept that involves more than just one company handing off a function to another company. Outsourcing can also involve a large, vertically integrated company offshoring a particular skillset to a business unit or subsidiary located in a geography that is better suited—in both talent and environment—to a particular function. Hence, we see technical managers in all types of large and small companies facing the challenges of globalization—the handling of culturally and linguistically diverse teams dispersed across multiple geographies and time zones.

Managing the global team

For large IC manufacturers trying to coordinate internal teams located around the world—as well as for smaller companies seeking to optimize relationships with other design shops, outside consultants, and customers with operations in other locales—the skillset required to manage diverse teams is complex and often difficult to master. But failure in this area is not an option. At Tanner EDA, we have developed a set of strategies to help customers overcome the hurdles of a globalized semiconductor supply chain. As illustrated in Figure 1, globalization strategy must encompass overlapping issues of corporate management, CAD management, and engineering management.

Almost every customer we deal with today is involved in projects that never sleep; design continues 24 hours a day, around the world. Even more importantly, as the complexity of the projects increases, so does the size of the teams. A chip developed today may have 50 to 100 different "sets of hands" working on some aspect of the product, which means that management must act aggressively to control these projects.

Managers must accept that they can no longer rely on many of the traditional factors that caused project teams to have coherence in the past—factors such as a common sense of purpose, a shared history, or the bonding that comes from a group of people working down the hall. In this age of globalization, a team will often be assembled for a single project, only meet face-to-face at the outset of that project, and then disband as soon as the project is complete.

It is imperative, then, that within the short-lived timeframe of a modern-day project, teams communicate effectively so that they can begin work immediately and work together efficiently to meet their time-to-market and ROI targets without fail. If a product is to succeed in competitive, fast-paced global markets, managers must make sure that the integration of the product team, even across geographies and technologies, happens seamlessly.

At Tanner EDA, we believe that working on a common platform such as Microsoft Windows can provide the make-or-break difference. Design tools should be readily accessible, easily downloadable, and always characterized by an easy ramp-up and learning curve. Tools that fit this description guarantee the speedy empowerment of the project team—a compelling argument in favor of Windows, which is an internationalized, locally managed software platform.
Localize the global task
Work globally, speak locally

The next word of advice we offer our customers pertains to localization of software. With localization, a company tries to trade off the need for the local groups within its company (or its customers' local operations) to operate the necessary tools and processes efficiently within their own local languages and cultural environments. At the same time, the company tries to retain sufficient interoperability so that it can exchange data with someone else, somewhere else, in a different language.

It's a neat trick, and not one easily achieved, particularly as design and layout activities become more spread out around the world. Tanner EDA customers know they can no longer assume that everyone involved in their projects speaks English. In fact, English-only design tools can slow down the learning curve on a project and make it more difficult to bring the project to completion. As a result, we have emphasized in our newest tools the ability to completely localize the user interface. The menus, dialogs, error messages, and so forth can be translated into a local language. We now ship with Chinese, Japanese, and English as our primary languages, and we plan to support additional languages in the future.

Licensing and legalities

Licensing is another crucial issue we emphasize for those who want to succeed globally. Tool vendors that support customers involved in a non-stop, global development effort must themselves begin to think globally. However, some of the biggest EDA tool vendors are failing to fully embrace these circumstances by actively preventing their customers from using licenses at different times of the day, or in different parts of the world. By restricting licenses across geographic boundaries, these vendors prevent even multinational customers from sharing network licenses across continents, forcing those customers to buy extra licenses.

At Tanner EDA, we see this attitude as distinctly shortsighted. With our floating licenses, we allow and, in fact, encourage international use of our products. We also issue perpetual licenses, whereas some of our competitors continue to issue exclusively time-based licenses. We believe that, due to the reality of globalization, we must actively encourage our customers to use their licensees around the clock to gain competitive advantage.

Adjacent to these issues are larger business issues related to design and development policies. Clearly, a company must be able to distribute policy across its teams. To aid in this activity, one of the features in our newest tool releases—one that is garnering positive feedback from our customers—is the ability for end users to build their own policies into the tools. If a customer wants to restrict certain naming conventions, for example, within cells, nets, or instances, it can do so by using new features in our tools. In addition, local management styles and reporting expectations should be reflected in the manner within which tools are used in a setting. This flexibility is built into our newest releases; we see it not so much as a question of internationalizing our tool, but as a question of supporting local design styles within regional groups in a company or across companies partnering on a project.

An additional—and equally important—aspect of tool-user flexibility is the ability to implement more than one type of design flow. Managers and their teams want to be able to tweak the sequence of events needed to complete a project. They may also want to retrieve or distribute data at various points within each project. The tools must support variable information sharing and revisions controls, particularly for a team that includes multiple parties working across geographies. In this era of globalization, revision controls are crucial and must be implemented formally. Workflow choices are also crucial; implementations must permit flexibility.

The price of productivity

In addition to the issues we have discussed, globalization and outsourcing have also clearly put pricing pressure on engineering and on the software and hardware needed for design.

Traditionally, analog and mixed-signal design work has been performed with Unix-based tools, which are hosted on expensive workstations that provide little integration with other tools within the workflow. Not only has that been problematic, but the workstations themselves have been extremely expensive. In addition, managing these tools across remote locations has been difficult. Not every remote office has a system administrator—let alone a full complement of system administrators—whose only job is to install applications, synchronize licenses, and manage updates. Even low-cost platforms such as Linux are challenged by a fast-moving, highly fragmented distribution base, leading to hidden system management issues and costs.

At Tanner EDA, we believe that by providing tools on the ubiquitous Windows platform, we are helping to address these issues. We provide tools for analog and mixed-signal design—a type of work that entails a great deal of handcrafting.

Currently, there is a shortage of analog and mixed-signal design tools available on inexpensive platforms to help move the industry towards the more automated process that characterizes digital design. It's a situation we are trying to remedy with our newest integrated tool suites. Our tools make it easy to work with the other workflow components; whether you are working on e-mail or documentation, we make it easy to copy and paste a picture, screenshot, or piece of layout into a Word document. We deliver licenses to our customers via e-mail. Installation is easy—just double-click on a file and the installation and synchronization will happen automatically.

Naturally, the efficiency of the tool is important—how quickly it renders a design, how quickly it opens a database, and so forth—but it's the price of the tools and hardware that is a reflection of the new global team. If an engineer in one location is paid $100,000, a company may be willing to spend $100,000 for a piece of software to help the engineer work more quickly. If, however, the engineer is working in an emerging economy and only costs the company $15,000, the company is much less likely to buy the $100,000 package to support him or her. This situation is now being offset somewhat by the fact that as we move to more advanced geometries, there are additional complexities and capabilities expected from the tool.

Nevertheless, overpriced EDA tools costing hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars per copy clash with the wage scales of engineers in locations such as China, India, or Romania. In these locations, the tools must not only be easy to deploy, use, and maintain, and come with complete documentation, but they also must be available at a price that matches the realities of the local economies. And, they must operate on hardware that also matches those realities.

A comprehensive strategy

Today's companies must embrace the fact that the engineering world has changed. Demands for new and nimble engineering teams and work environments will continue. At Tanner EDA, we constantly remind our customers that developing strategies to deal with these realities is not an optional exercise, it is a mandatory one. Having a structure and protocol that enables international teams to work towards a common goal is something to establish—and, once in place, something to celebrate.

About the Author

Dr. John Tanner is founder and CEO of Tanner EDA.