Do we need an international EDA roadmap?

1. Introduction

EDA has long been considered as a “soft business” led by a limited number of companies, mostly located in the United States (in the early 1980s) and competing on the basis of functionalities sometimes in a closed environment to sell their incomplete offering to their customers.

This situation has forced some of their ASIC customers, at that time, to develop internally EDA packages (such as hardware synthesis), a costly and limited solution for a semiconductor company.

Libraries then started to be developed internally, creating large teams of very skilled experts within one single company and at unaffordable costs…but nothing changed at EDA suppliers.

There were few early startups developments, some of them bringing some degree of innovation at the industrial level on a limited area of the design flow around 1975 both in the United States (e.g. Stanford) and in Europe (The Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Institute of Grenoble (IMAG) developed the first electrical simulation tool called IMAG XX).

At this point of time, more complex chips were developed driving the need for more industrial solutions, and EDA tool suppliers in the United States started selling more dedicated tools such as synthesis, place and route operating as “standalone” tools and often from various EDA providers.

Some developments at universities (above-mentioned IMAG simulator) or internally at semiconductor companies were achieved when the design flow was missing these functions.

Industrial solutions started to appear later from the United States (Cadence, Synopsys, Mentor), each company having a dedicated field of expertise with tools operated in standalone mode by ASIC designers. This situation is still mostly true, and companies individually have made significant progress in their fields of expertise through consolidations.

2-The global EDA status in 2009

2-1: Partial consolidation

Today's most relevant solutions offered by the four main EDA companies are summarized below.

Users continue to deplore a lack of global consolidation and compatibility between EDA vendors' tools.

Figures below indicate the business dominance of three suppliers with different levels of business stability, two of them having built a strong ecosystem:

-Synopsys in the System-Level Catalyst Program to accelerate system-level design adoption with 24 partners (called “innovators”), 11 DesignWare system-level libraries, 9 system studio and service providers.

-Cadence Design Systems. With the "Ready for SOI Technology" program, Cadence, ARM and IBM provided an initial offering of SOI intellectual property (deliverables from silicon, IPs and EDA suppliers). Boeing and Synopsys have already joined the effort.

-Mentor Graphics is focusing on software verification and DFM platform (physical verification): ATPG, DFM and complete DFT (scan and BIST).

The business level evolution (Synopsys and Mentor) is rather flat or decreasing (Cadence), showing globally little capability of investing in new developments –with Cadence going in the red through several acquisitions.