Moderator Greg Spirakis, independent consultant and former vice president of Intel's design technology group, reminded panelists that "things can change tremendously in ten years." He asked whether Moore's Law will continue, how programmable platforms will impact the EDA design flow, and how big the semiconductor and EDA industries will be in 2017.

Fu-Chieh Hsu, vice president for design and technology platforms at TSMC, said the semiconductor industry is now in a "golden age" of synergy following a "frenzy" that ended with the crash of 2001. The industry will reach "maturity" after 2017, he said. Until 2017, he predicted, growth will be "a moderate but respectable 8 percent," resulting in a semiconductor industry around $600 billion.

Hsu said that the total number of designs will continue to drop, wafer volume will increase, and tool development will get more difficult. To cope with complexity, the number of technology platforms will be reduced over time. "There may be only a handful of platforms that designers can design to," he said.

Juan-Antonio Carballo, general partner at Argon Venture Partners, said we're moving towards a "nodeless" semiconductor industry where technology nodes are no longer moving in a lockstep fashion. Growing risk factors include time to market on high-volume applications, power and performance uncertainty, and designs with hundreds of heterogeneous cores. Carballo said a shift to Asia will be pronounced on the semiconductor side but delayed on the EDA side.

EDA software, Carballo said, must support world-wide real-time collaboration and ultra-fast prototyping. It must support fault tolerant, adaptive, and redundant designs, and be accessible through supercomputing and hardware acceleration.

Carballo said the semiconductor industry will go from $280 billion today to between $600 billion and $1 trillion in 2017. EDA, he predicted, will go from $5 billion today to between $8 and $12 billion in 2017. While three big players dominate EDA today, that will "somewhat disappear" by 2017 as private equity and non-EDA players take a bigger role, he said. Carballo said there will be more involvement in EDA among fabless, design services, IDM and foundry players, and that EDA won't be as separate as it is today from other software industries.