The new year is beginning on a troubled note for the electronics industry. Just when EDA companies should be cooperating to build a technical and legal foundation for system-on-chip design, they are sadly dragging themselves in the opposite direction.

With Cadence and Mentor now warring over Quickturn, four of the five largest U.S. EDA companies are involved in legal action against one another. And one of those companies-Avant!, which is battling a Cadence lawsuit-has seen current and former executives indicted.

The legal strife bodes ill for 1999, for several reasons. First, in a year in which the EDA industry must bridge the "productivity gap" between design tools and deep-submicron processes, resources will be earmarked for court costs as opposed to R&D. The dollars that Mentor, Cadence and Quickturn are spending on their three-way battle are badly needed to develop the next generation of verification tools.

Second, EDA vendor cooperation is vital for tool interoperability, which users say is increasingly critical for design creation and reuse. The Cadence/Synopsys Spine99 effort is a recent example of how competitors must work together on interoperability. But the legal climate casts a pall over the prospects for similar efforts.

Third, users of at least two types of expensive tools-Quickturn emulators and Avant! place-and-route systems-now face an uncertain future. Choosing and deploying such strategic design tools is difficult enough without having to consider whether the product line or the company's principals will become ensnared in a legal mesh.

Worst of all, the sniping comes at a time when the semiconductor industry is struggling to create a legal basis for the transition to a market based on the open and fair exchange of intellectual property. It will be hard to lay a foundation for that business while companies are grabbing bricks.

Our wish for 1999 is that EDA vendors resolve to focus on technology first, to cooperate on interoperability despite their legal entanglements, and to mend their rifts as quickly as possible.