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Internet to Serve as EDA Delivery Platform
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Silicon Valley is a center of creativity, the heart of a great Golden Age in the history of technology. Central to that phenomenon is the electronic design automation (EDA) industry, which provides fundamental supporting technology that enables the design of complex systems and chips. But EDA is undergoing a rapid pace of change along with everything else in Silicon Valley.
Aart de Geus, CEO of Synopsys, observed that for the past 4-5 years, the chip industry has brought about geometrical increases in complexity that are now challenging the design community. Because of that, the Internet has exploded and has driven an explosion in e-Business. This is explained by Metcalfe's Law, which states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes in the network. For the last five years, the technology has moved in a bottom-up direction - from chips enabling the Internet, to the Internet enabling e-Business. But de Geus noted that this Christmas season, that completely turned around. "The Internet is much too slow. We need a better infrastructure; we need better chips. As a result, the bulk of the investment is moving back to the Internet, and that, in turn, is bringing a great deal of investment back into the chip industry. So the drive is now just beginning to move in the reverse direction, top-down, from e-Business to the Internet to chips."
Because of licensing model issues and excessive price discounting, the EDA industry grew at only 6% in 1999. The industry is expected to recover in 2000 to around 15% growth. In the following two or three years, this growth rate will jump to 19-20% due to the overall strength in the high technology industry and the need for new "tools." The software applications and hardware platforms that are used to design electronic products and to keep up with design complexity. But EDA growth rates could be much higher if the Internet companies are any indicator.
Internet Delivery
This year, the Internet will emerge as a means for the delivery of EDA tools and services on a pay-per-use basis. That is, rather than needing to buy an EDA application, users will have the option of "renting" many tools for fees that
are based on the amount of usage time. This will be an attractive alternative to those who don't want to bother with system administration, because the tool itself will reside on a remote server, and the user's workstation will act as a client that simply accesses the tool through the Internet, using a Web browser.
This Application Service Provider (ASP) model can lower the barriers to entry for the new systems company that has a bright idea for a new product, but which lacks the capital to build up a set of expensive development tools, computing networks, system administrators, and other overheads associated with a full in-house engineering team. The ASP model will be targeted at small to mid-sized companies that need access to specialized, computer-intensive tools on an infrequent basis. Wrapped around it will be design consulting services from experts located remotely that can collaborate in an automated fashion over the Internet to help solve difficult design problems.
New Tools Expected
In 2000, we expect to see announcements of robust new EDA tools for higher-level design creation, system-on-chip prototyping, formal verification, and physical analysis. One of the most exciting trends will be that these new tools will start to automate the task of design creation, implementation, and analysis of physical characteristics such as noise, heat, power, interference, reliability, and many others. This will be absolutely necessary to accelerate time-to-market as the most advanced customers move into production with new 0.18ƒIm and 0.15ƒIm process technologies.
The existing creation and implementation tools will become more of a commodity, subject to greater price pressures and general slowdowns in sales. Jacques Benkowski, chief executive officer of Monterey Design Systems, an emerging vendor of place and route tools, said, "We see a temporary emphasis on what we call 'solution patching,' for designers who need to continue to use old tools and try to somehow make them work. This will create a boost in services, and a few new tools will come into being as Œglue toolsƒP for tasks such as design partitioning and local optimization, again to try to make the old tools work."
In the "New Economy," time-to-market is king. If products do not make their market windows, there are severe consequences to the bottom line of the company's balance sheet, as well as to its stock valuations. In this environment, we need to re-evaluate the worth of the EDA tools and of the associated design consulting services and reusable semiconductor intellectual property.
It's important to understand that the value proposition of EDA is greater than just a software purchase. Consider that a systems company loses an average of US$155,000 per week if a new product is late to market, and for a large player, this number can be much higher. If an EDA vendor can help a systems company to get a new product to market on schedule, or even significantly earlier than the schedule requires, that vendor offers great value to the systems house. Industry anaylsts are expecting to see innovative new contractual schemes to emerge this year that let EDA vendors share in the incentives to shorten time-to-market, and this will greatly benefit the customer as well.
by Rita Glover
Websites:
Monterey: http://www.montereydesign.com
Synopsys: http://www.synopsys.com
(May 2000 Issue, Nikkei Electronics Asia)
Aart de Geus, CEO of Synopsys, observed that for the past 4-5 years, the chip industry has brought about geometrical increases in complexity that are now challenging the design community. Because of that, the Internet has exploded and has driven an explosion in e-Business. This is explained by Metcalfe's Law, which states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes in the network. For the last five years, the technology has moved in a bottom-up direction - from chips enabling the Internet, to the Internet enabling e-Business. But de Geus noted that this Christmas season, that completely turned around. "The Internet is much too slow. We need a better infrastructure; we need better chips. As a result, the bulk of the investment is moving back to the Internet, and that, in turn, is bringing a great deal of investment back into the chip industry. So the drive is now just beginning to move in the reverse direction, top-down, from e-Business to the Internet to chips."
Because of licensing model issues and excessive price discounting, the EDA industry grew at only 6% in 1999. The industry is expected to recover in 2000 to around 15% growth. In the following two or three years, this growth rate will jump to 19-20% due to the overall strength in the high technology industry and the need for new "tools." The software applications and hardware platforms that are used to design electronic products and to keep up with design complexity. But EDA growth rates could be much higher if the Internet companies are any indicator.
Internet Delivery
This year, the Internet will emerge as a means for the delivery of EDA tools and services on a pay-per-use basis. That is, rather than needing to buy an EDA application, users will have the option of "renting" many tools for fees that
are based on the amount of usage time. This will be an attractive alternative to those who don't want to bother with system administration, because the tool itself will reside on a remote server, and the user's workstation will act as a client that simply accesses the tool through the Internet, using a Web browser.
This Application Service Provider (ASP) model can lower the barriers to entry for the new systems company that has a bright idea for a new product, but which lacks the capital to build up a set of expensive development tools, computing networks, system administrators, and other overheads associated with a full in-house engineering team. The ASP model will be targeted at small to mid-sized companies that need access to specialized, computer-intensive tools on an infrequent basis. Wrapped around it will be design consulting services from experts located remotely that can collaborate in an automated fashion over the Internet to help solve difficult design problems.
New Tools Expected
In 2000, we expect to see announcements of robust new EDA tools for higher-level design creation, system-on-chip prototyping, formal verification, and physical analysis. One of the most exciting trends will be that these new tools will start to automate the task of design creation, implementation, and analysis of physical characteristics such as noise, heat, power, interference, reliability, and many others. This will be absolutely necessary to accelerate time-to-market as the most advanced customers move into production with new 0.18ƒIm and 0.15ƒIm process technologies.
The existing creation and implementation tools will become more of a commodity, subject to greater price pressures and general slowdowns in sales. Jacques Benkowski, chief executive officer of Monterey Design Systems, an emerging vendor of place and route tools, said, "We see a temporary emphasis on what we call 'solution patching,' for designers who need to continue to use old tools and try to somehow make them work. This will create a boost in services, and a few new tools will come into being as Œglue toolsƒP for tasks such as design partitioning and local optimization, again to try to make the old tools work."
In the "New Economy," time-to-market is king. If products do not make their market windows, there are severe consequences to the bottom line of the company's balance sheet, as well as to its stock valuations. In this environment, we need to re-evaluate the worth of the EDA tools and of the associated design consulting services and reusable semiconductor intellectual property.
It's important to understand that the value proposition of EDA is greater than just a software purchase. Consider that a systems company loses an average of US$155,000 per week if a new product is late to market, and for a large player, this number can be much higher. If an EDA vendor can help a systems company to get a new product to market on schedule, or even significantly earlier than the schedule requires, that vendor offers great value to the systems house. Industry anaylsts are expecting to see innovative new contractual schemes to emerge this year that let EDA vendors share in the incentives to shorten time-to-market, and this will greatly benefit the customer as well.
by Rita Glover
Websites:
Monterey: http://www.montereydesign.com
Synopsys: http://www.synopsys.com
(May 2000 Issue, Nikkei Electronics Asia)
