Today, many market opportunities are being ignored as EDA
vendors fight over the same $3 billion pie. It is estimated that for
every dollar that goes to EDA vendors, an additional $3 is spent on EDA
by the chip design companies. So where is this additional $9 billion
going?
Customers spend part of it internally developing and supporting tools they need, but which no company offers.
An even larger portion is spent by customers developing their own
solutions for interoperability, exhausting countless hours adapting
vendor-provided tools to work together.
The best opportunity for EDA industry growth is through openness.
Openness facilitates interactions between tools. It requires common
data formats, industry-standard databases and open application
programming interfaces, all of which can breed new tools.
The majority of today's tool sales are in the areas of synthesis and
place and route. Bringing a new type of tool to the market is
difficult, since it often requires a new database structure and must
interface to the many tools already in use.
Less than 10 percent of development time is spent on creating the core
algorithm in a new tool. The other 90 percent is spent on making the
software work with other tools. If vendors opened up their tool
interfaces, giving customers access to truly interoperable,
best-of-breed tools, the value of the entire market would dramatically
increase, and customer satisfaction would skyrocket.
Several opportunities exist. For example, vendors are giving high-speed
digital and analog design much less attention than they deserve. Both
of these areas are ripe for new, lucrative solutions from EDA
companies.
Two recent examples of companies taking advantage of new market
opportunities are Barcelona Design, which is addressing analog design
using the Web, and Verplex, working with formal verification.
Customers also want open databases from EDA vendors. Several leading
companies are pushing for open database standards. An example is
OpenAccess, which is working to develop an industry-standard open API
using Cadence Design Systems' Genesis database.
Vendor openness will drive customer satisfaction and open a market that
is at least three times the value of today's market. An open attitude
about working with other companies to exchange data generates
opportunities for start-up companies with new tools, and for
established leaders with entrenched tools. Chip designers and tool
developers also need to work together, since breakthroughs typically
occur at the interface between the two fields.
By working together, EDA companies and customers can achieve higher
levels of productivity, improved revenue and greater satisfaction.
Mark Santoro is Director of Hardware Engineering at Juniper Networks Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.).
