What, exactly, is an EDA platform? According to Paul Estrada, corporate vice president of market development for Cadence, it's "a complete set of related applications utilizing common underlying best-of-breed technologies, optimized based on an overriding methodology."

Cadence's SoC Encounter platform, said Estrada, is a complete set of RTL-to-GDSII implementation tools, using a core set of technologies that are optimized for a "wire-centric" design methodology. Cadence also offers the Incisive verification platform.

Craig Cochran, director of marketing for Synopsys' Galaxy design platform, defined a platform as "a solution of highly correlated tools that work together to solve problems comprehensively, in a convergent front-to-back flow." He said the Galaxy implementation platform and Discovery verification platform are both "very open" to third-party tools.

Cadence's platforms are a far cry from yesterday's frameworks, Estrada said. "Frameworks were focused on providing infrastructures for tool integration," he said. "Unfortunately, the infrastructures took on a life of their own at the expense of the end goal."

"Frameworks focused on databases and design management, but didn't improve designer productivity because they lacked coherent, comprehensive solutions," said Synopsys' Cochran.

'Data repositories'

Unlike some of the old frameworks, the new platforms are based on widely used tools, and they appear to offer tighter integration and more openness. But, according to Venk Shukla, vice president of marketing and business development at Magma Design Automation, both Galaxy and SoC Encounter are "essentially data repositories" that offer only slight improvements over frameworks.

That's because the individual tools still have their own data structures, Shukla said. Magma, he claimed, offers a tool set based on a single data model, such that users can make a change anywhere and see its impact everywhere else.

Magma avoids the term "platform," Shukla said, because it implies a physical object on which tools sit on top. There is, indeed, room for confusion. If a customizable SoC is a "platform," a workstation is a "platform" and the tools that run on it are a "platform," we're using platforms that run on platforms to design platforms.

Richard Goering is managing editor of Design Automation for EE Times.