You hit the nail on the head in terms of what afflicts EDA today and how it needs to reinvent itself to be of value to the broader design community.

I couldn’t agree more with Paul’s three trends and what struck me most is the fragmented end-market for chips not yielding high enough a volume for products. I have seen this first hand having worked with ARM and MIPS, as well as their end-users and OEM/ODMs over the years. A microcosm of an example of reversing this trend can be found in a very small company that does non-high end video games (www.zeeboinc.com). They rely on the cellphone market for their system’s BoM, as well as tapping into the economies of scale of the existing chipsets found in a mobile phone, which apparently constitutes the single largest set of silicon in a device. It’s amazing that they were able to get their product out with just $4Mill. of capital! While I have no connection with Zeebo, I thought there in lay an interesting way for other larger companies to emulate, trying to find multiple end-products for their chips.

I too think that there’re excellent prospects for companies to go into the “design navigation” space that’d help end-users explore multiple design parameters as well as trade-off multiple/cost effective hardware/software solutions. You just cannot ignore to look at the entire puzzle of product development.

cheers,
VM

Regarding the environment to write Verilog/VHDL, there are way less HW designers than C++/Java developers. So that may be one reason why Verilog/VHDL environment are trailing. But another reason is the resistance of a lot of designers to move to new platform. I am all for dumping Verilog/VHDL and move to C/C++ to describe HW. Unfortunately it’s like asking some industry to drop all their Fortran 77 libraries: they won’t, because there is too much legacy. Only companies that start from scratch with fresh people will be able to move up the HDL languages.

By 2020 I am pretty much convinced that HW design will be based on cores with IPs you can buy off the shelves. The application software, system architecture, and full-system verification will be where there is value and a sustainable market. There will be no more full VLSI implementation, except for a handful of core manufacturers. Where EDA will be then? Absorbed by these core manufacturers, absorbed by HW service companies, transformed into a system-level design and verification industry. Or no longer present because obsoleted.

Semiconductor/EDA industries including language standards organizations are not being able to adopt and keep up with the advancements in software recent technologies and trends to enable asic engineers to develop complex and large designs in more efficient manner.

I mean for example, I hate the fact that majority of professional design and verification engineers use gvim/emacs for editing code; a decent IDE (ideally open source or free) is still a dream for us. Compare what we have (gvim/emacs or any other) with top IDEs for languages like Java, C++.

I said ‘language standards’ since I have this strong opinion about Verilog. Writing a pure Verilog does not make sense to me. And I do not see Verilog evolving by any means towards being more developer-friendly language. I cannot imagine designers writing a Verilog code by 2020.

Documentation of Verilog and verification IPs; such an important aspect and highly overlooked by the most.

SystemVerilog – It is nowhere close to being a good OOP language to me, it just an extension of Verilog that has concept of class.

A lot can be discussed but semiconductor industry sure need change! IMHO.

Correct me if I am wrong.

The trouble with Cadence or any big company is that they prefer customers to use only their tools in the methodology. This forces SaaS to be applicable to the customers who have already chosen their tools. Now, if a customer has already chosen the tool, that means there is a perceived value in the tool. If so, then SaaS model will just erode the $$ and does nothing to the bottom line. Today, SaaS is used as a bargaining chip if the customer draws a hard line on the pricing. Some companies also sacrifice the pricing on actual tools using SaaS, but try to capture value by offering methodology services. I cant comment on how successful this business model is.