Most of today's EDA tools were developed for creating new IC designs. Yet, according to Dataquest, the majority of today's complex designs are a combination of new IP and existing legacy design.

In the consumer electronics market, time to money and time to volume are everything. Delivering a product even a few weeks late can be catastrophic. Note the late delivery of the recently-announced web-enabled phone from a leading mobile phone provider. Word on the street is that it was delivered three weeks later then planned.

This cost the company a whopping $400 million in lost market opportunity, as it could not deliver to its cell phone providers. And, a study by McKinsey and Company showed that the largest single contributing factor to product profitability is on-time delivery. In that study, with product lifecycles at 18 months, a three month slip in product delivery reduced total product profitability by 33%. These days, with product lifecycles nearing six months for some consumer items, a few weeks' slip reduces product profits dramatically.

Time to volume means more then delivering the product quickly — it requires that the product work as intended. In the consumer electronics market, a product delivered on time that doesn't work is a death knell for the product and potentially for the vendor.

So, why the dearth of EDA tools to handle the challenges of re-designing an existing product into a new product? I am not sure.

However, I do know that to help engineers and their companies achieve time-to-money and time-to-volume, EDA tools must deliver new capabilities. They must enable engineers to easily combine legacy modules and test benches, external IP, and some new features.

The legacy design modules and test benches are a rat's nest of old code and tests, and can't be handled by most EDA tools. Much of this untangling is done manually. However, the ability to quickly re-design products is crucial to the health of consumer electronics companies. They need EDA tools that help the designer, verification engineer, test engineer, project manager, and design manager respond quickly to market demands and opportunities.

I've talked to many engineers about product design that uses old legacy code. They've told me that every time they start a design, it's like going up to grandma's attic and trying to piece together a hundred years of artifacts to create a family tree. Its sweaty and time-consuming, and you always end up dirty and frustrated.

If electronics companies are to deliver consumer products that meet the time, cost and feature needs of the market, the product development process must be streamlined. The EDA industry must deliver new tools for fast creation and analysis to bring existing product designs to a known quality level. The tools need to incorporate a means for navigating and exploring existing designs, and ways to minimize the risk of design changes demanded by the market. This new class of EDA tools will truly enable delivery to market of better, faster, cheaper consumer electronics.

Steve Sapiro is vice president of marketing at EDA startup Stelar Tools.