EDA from "soft business to competitive business"

For years, the target of each single EDA company has been to fight for its slice of the EDA cake without considering the strategic aspect of EDA versus product competitiveness. As seen on the chart below, EDA is a key enabler for Time-to-Market and then competitiveness, but to achieve this goal there has to be a major change in the EDA strategy: Less independence for market value increase.

In the past, EDA companies struggled against each other on the market to try to capture customers in a "closed framework", preventing them from getting the best overall combination of available tools from various vendors for solving their own problem This was a low-profile solution for the final customer.

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As represented on the chart above, Time-To-Market revenue penalties are very sensitive to being late on the market, a situation unacceptable for customers in general but more specifically for system customers who are getting more and more weight on the semiconductor business as seen below.

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Consequently, the EDA industry should move to a proactive mode to serve these new system level markets and share the EDA developments the same way the SIA Roadmap paves the way for most equipment innovations aimed at nanotechnologies processes.