In a series of recent interviews with EE Times, executives described a three-year "deep collaboration" between the two companies that started in 2002. Ultimately, this collaboration resulted in the commercial release of the Cadence tool in June as well as internal EDA technology used at IBM, according to the executives. But, they said, both the project and the new Cadence router were based on technology and code developed within Cadence's Catena technology incubation project.

"If you look at the contributions to the routing components, most of the contributions to the router were made by the Cadence team," said Leon Stok, director of CAD at IBM.

The claims by Stok and Cadence executives run counter to reports, including one last month in Deepchip.com moderator John Cooley's Wiretap blog, which indicate that the technology underlying the Space-Based Router, originally introduced as the Cadence Precision Router, was mostly developed by IBM.

According to Stok, as well as Cadence executives Ted Vucurevich, chief technology officer, and Richard Brashears, vice president for advanced technology development, the two companies engaged in a deep partnership involving Fellows and other high-level technologists on both sides. At a time when the industry is increasingly calling for greater collaboration, the three-year project could serve as a model for future partnerships, they said.

According to executives from both companies, Brashears met with IBM in 2002 to demonstrate a new core routing architecture and implementation of algorithms. Stok said he and other IBM representatives immediately latched on to the routing technology, as well as the componentization and modulation of the architecture. This componentization allowed IBM to take aspects of the technology and apply it to its own internal EDA tools.

"You cannot underestimate the importance of the componentization that has taken place here," Stok said. "It allows you to pull the right components together to build an EDA solution. And it allows for the building of collaboration across companies."

The executives acknowledged that much of the confusion and what they claim to be misstatements about who developed what can be attributed to the nature of the collaboration.

"People only slowly start to understand and are confused by the componentization of new EDA tools," Stok said. "We are not taking a complete tool from a vendor and integrating it into our flow. We are really taking the source code components and integrating them into our tool set."

Brashears acknowledged that the term co-development is a vague one and that Cadence obviously worked with IBM to develop the technology that ultimately became the Space-Based Router. But he contradicted a published report that maintained that upwards of 50 percent of the tool development was done by IBM. "The code was conceived and created for routing inside incubation," Brashears said.

According to Brashears, the routing technology created by Cadence generates opportunities for in-depth collaboration because its architectural core components can be exposed to enable development of solutions to design-for-manufacturability related convergence issues.

Brashears said the Cadence-IBM collaboration could be a model for future collaborations between the No. 1 EDA vendor and customers. But, he acknowledged that part of the reason that Cadence chose to collaborate with IBM in this manner is because of IBM's rich EDA technology, something other customers may not be able to lay claim to. Brashears even suggested that EDA vendors may collaborate amongst themselves at this in-depth level in the future.

"There would be a lot of issues with that, but on the other hand, its not 1985," Brashears said. "It's worth thinking about. If you can build a computer across 10 different companies and ship it all over the world, perhaps we can also leverage that sort of development across EDA companies."