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greg-williams
The EDA field really needs to learn from recent development in test and ...
Jo Borel
I am not surprised by the statement...a little bit late reaction in my opinion ...
Mentor chief sees system design as main challenge
Kariyatil Krishnadas
12/13/2010 8:42 PM EST
EDA growth lies in new industries
The challenges of manufacturing yields can be solved by using yield-centric design and verification flows, Rhines said. Similarly, the problem of increasing design costs can be met by automation of embedded software while macro system integration problems can be addressed by distributed system design with model-driven design, he added
"At the chip, board and system level, success will be influenced by system design," Rhines said. "Also, just as we now have electronic design automation, we will have embedded software automation in the future."
Rhines said EDA vendors would also find revenue growth in a transition to new industries, including the automobile and aerospace industries, because of the increasing complexity of electronics.
The only material change in the last 15 years in the semiconductor market is that the growth of the PC segment has slowed, while growth in both wired and wireless communications has increased, Rhines said. Everything else has remained remarkably the same, including the consumer, automotive and other segments, Rhines said.
"Solar and medical electronics are growing markets, but the semiconductor industry is not likely to grow in double digits anymore," Rhines said."That is one more reason why we in the EDA business need to look more broadly at the problems to solve. If we just look at what we can do to just make the chip designers job easier, we will not be adding any substantial value."
While the design industry has always had a shortage of experienced and skilled talent, Rhines said he was less worried about this now than a decade ago, as the infrastructure has developed in countries such as India to produce engineering graduates. Besides, innovation will increase if there are more people involved, Rhines said.
In 2000, the number of foreign nationals who remained in the U.S. after they finished their doctorates was about 97 percent. There has been a massive transition since, with PhDs increasingly returning to the countries in which they were born, particularly China and India, according to Rhines.
-K.C. Krishnadas is site editor at TechOnline India.
The challenges of manufacturing yields can be solved by using yield-centric design and verification flows, Rhines said. Similarly, the problem of increasing design costs can be met by automation of embedded software while macro system integration problems can be addressed by distributed system design with model-driven design, he added
"At the chip, board and system level, success will be influenced by system design," Rhines said. "Also, just as we now have electronic design automation, we will have embedded software automation in the future."
Rhines said EDA vendors would also find revenue growth in a transition to new industries, including the automobile and aerospace industries, because of the increasing complexity of electronics.
The only material change in the last 15 years in the semiconductor market is that the growth of the PC segment has slowed, while growth in both wired and wireless communications has increased, Rhines said. Everything else has remained remarkably the same, including the consumer, automotive and other segments, Rhines said.
"Solar and medical electronics are growing markets, but the semiconductor industry is not likely to grow in double digits anymore," Rhines said."That is one more reason why we in the EDA business need to look more broadly at the problems to solve. If we just look at what we can do to just make the chip designers job easier, we will not be adding any substantial value."
While the design industry has always had a shortage of experienced and skilled talent, Rhines said he was less worried about this now than a decade ago, as the infrastructure has developed in countries such as India to produce engineering graduates. Besides, innovation will increase if there are more people involved, Rhines said.
In 2000, the number of foreign nationals who remained in the U.S. after they finished their doctorates was about 97 percent. There has been a massive transition since, with PhDs increasingly returning to the countries in which they were born, particularly China and India, according to Rhines.
-K.C. Krishnadas is site editor at TechOnline India.
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VincePG
12/14/2010 10:29 PM EST
The most notable piece of information in this article is that in 2000, 97% of PhDs who finished their doctorates in the US stayed in the US. That number is way down in 2010, and the trend is growing, particularly for Chinese and Indian PhDs. The US better start investing in scientific education and home growing it’s theoretical base or we are doomed to be a second rate technology power in the 21st century. The rest of this article they've been writing the same thing for 10 years: system focus, more efficient simulation techniques for semis, brut force techniques are obsolete, yada-yada-yada.
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Sheetal.Pandey
12/14/2010 10:52 PM EST
No doubt MG has some of the best tools to support design. Do they support system level design also? I would like to know more about it.
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docdivakar
12/15/2010 12:31 AM EST
@VincePG: your analysis pretty much sums it up! How ever, I would have liked to see a correlation between the % of PhD's returning to the number of design starts, startups and other efforts that utilized EDA's relevance.
I hear a number of opportunities in automobile and aerospace industries, solar, medical electronics, etc. quoted by Dr. Rhines but I don't see any furthering of thoughts to indicate growth for EDA business. Some of it like "we in the EDA business need to look more broadly at the problems to solve" is beginning to sound a bit like EDA-360!
By the way, here are some links to more coverage of Dr. Rhine's interaction with EDA professionals at Bangalore:
http://www.pradeepchakraborty.com/2010/12/mentors-wally-rhines-on-global-eda.html
Here is another blog where you will see a pic of Dr. Rhines that you have never seen before!
http://www.pradeepchakraborty.com/2010/12/eda-and-emerging-system-design.html
With the Mysore Peta (turban-like), the shawl and garland, he is now officially a Pundit!
Dr. MP Divakar
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eewiz
12/15/2010 1:06 AM EST
"Yes, I do see total EDA revenues increasing," Rhines said. "It is just that it will not come from people buying more simulators. It will come from other major changes, the whole paradigm change with more and more design is done at higher levels of abstraction, C-based design, synthesis, and where there is more hardware and software co-verification is done both in software at the transaction level and done with emulators at the hardware level."
Have been hearing the same for atleast past five years. Nothing changed till now.
IMO the problem with the EDA industry is that they dont have a steve jobs. Gimme a tool which can design a Mixed signal IC in 1 month and you will see how many more people will buy the tools,start new designs, startups will comeup ... EDA industry couldnt manage the complexity in the design process and mostly handed it down to engineers and in some cases introduced un-necessary complexity which resulted in very limited number of people who can use it and ultimately stagnant revenues.
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Jo Borel
12/15/2010 3:49 AM EST
I am not surprised by the statement...a little bit late reaction in my opinion since it was my comment to a Wally presentation in Grenoble a few years ago.
Also stated clearly in my Catrene program proposal below http://www.catrene.org/web/communication/publ_eda.php
Next question:When will EDA/Design founderies will develop????
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greg-williams
12/20/2010 9:57 AM EST
The EDA field really needs to learn from recent development in test and development methodologies that are rapidly increasing in the embedded software realm. Unit testing, and interface mocking are much more effective means of system design than model-based development. Model-based design tools tend to be much too heavy handed and generate horrible C code.
Unfortunately, the lack of maturity of tools for supporting this type of development are scarce or even non-existent in the EDA field of play. This presents a real opportunity for improvement in this area of engineering, but requires a break from traditional methods of design and considering that model-based design is not THE way of moving EDA design forward.
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