SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Cadence Design Systems Inc. takes the biggest step yet in its evolving design-services business this week, when it offers entire syst em-on-a-chip design capability.

Cadence's two-year-old Spectrum Design Services organization was created to help semiconductor and systems customers speed time-to-market by easing design bottlenecks. Its services include everything from offering cohesive, multivendor tool chains to solving point problems within specific designs.

While Spectrum has worked with customers like Motorola to develop system-on-a-chip designs, it had not formally announced until now its "system-on-chip transition services" and, more notably, defined the "system-chip acceleration strategy" that it will use to help customers incrementally transition to system-on-a-chip design.

"These guys really know what they're doing, and I think they're on the right track with this methodology strategy," said Gary Smith, principal analyst at Dataquest Inc. (San Jose, Calif.).

The company's system-chip acceleration strategy comprises four parts: a methodology road map, linchpin technologies for each segment, methodology/technology tr ansition services, and partners/services to help build intellectual-property (IP) portfolios.

The road map is the backbone of Cadence's system-chip strategy, dividing IC design into three segments:

Timing-driven design is characterized by a 5,000- to 250,000-gate deep-submicron ASIC made up entirely of logic generated by a small, focused team.

Block-based design creates a 150,000- to 1.5 million-gate complex ASIC using some IP but largely comprising logic from a multidisciplinary design team.

System-on-a-chip designs a 300,000-gate or greater system IC composed almost entirely of plug-and-play virtual components--standardized, predictable and preverified IP with some user-generated logic.

Cadence predicts this final segment of design will have to be created by two or more groups of designers, and each of these groups will have to be composed of multidisciplinary teams.

Steve Glaser, vice president of marketing, said that in each segment customers must identify the key enabling tech nologies that will let them establish a methodology and move to the next segment. "It needs to be clear which tools designers base their flows around," he said.

Then, Glaser said, system-chip transition services help customers develop methodologies that not only use the linchpin technologies, but are also tailored to their specific needs, including target applications. That tailoring, he said, differentiates it from the company's other methodology development services.

In the fourth and final part of its system-chip strategy, Cadence plans to help each customer develop an IP portfolio tuned to the customer's specific methodology.

Glaser said Cadence will not develop its own IP, leveraging instead the right partners for each job. "We are the Switzerland of IP,"he said. "If a customer needs something, we will help them get it."

Spectrum's move resurrected fears that Cadence would displace customers' engineers with its services, providing consultant-engineers at effectively lower rates and with out the hassle of overhead such as benefits. "It smells to me like Cadence is just repackaging the same old tools and consulting services,"said John Cooley, an EDA consultant who runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group forum on the Internet.

Cadence has countered that Spectrum is in business not as a design house but simply to speed customers' time-to-market.

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