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[EDA:EDGE] Toward Legitimacy:Piracy Gone Good
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My family has never known much about its genealogy, so a few years ago while traveling in Central America, I was amazed to discover that a possible ancestor of ours had been a sea pirate in the Caribbean in the 1600s. An Englishman named John Glover, he based his operations on a beautiful atoll off Belize known as Glover's Reef. Even then, piracy was a way to penetrate a market.
It seems we later took a step forward on a path to legitimacy. When I lived in Boston, Massachusetts, I discovered another John Glover, a naval general in the American Revolution in the 1770s and founder of the US Marines.
Now here I am in 2002, chalking up a twenty-year career of tracking the electronic design automation industry. And still yet, there are many instances of piracy; which set me to thinking about the effects, both short- and long-term.
I recently talked to Bruce Edwards, executive director of Altium, the Australian supplier of printed circuit board (PCB) software. The company was founded in 1985 under the name Protel and changed its name to Altium a few years ago after a series of mergers.
Non-Paying Copies
In its early years, Protel's legacy PCB product was pirated into China and Taiwan. At first, this caused the company great concern, because it might sell only one product into these regions and have many non-paying copies proliferated from that single copy. Protel sent in its distributors to negotiate with the pirates, but they were rebuffed.
Finally, after many years of feeling helpless, Protel found that the piracy actually had some benefits. In October 2001, Gartner Dataquest surveyed China and ranked Protel (Altium) as the country's most popular EDA vendor in terms of tool usage and customer awareness, even though the company ranks fifth in terms of market share. (Note that when this China study was repeated in 2002, the awareness of Altium (Protel) had dropped by about half, probably due to the company's name change.)
Today, Edwards said, "We now attribute much of our popularity in Asia to piracy." The company realizes that it was a blessing in disguise, because it got the product into the hands of users and the educational system in the region.
Edwards said that over time, as these designers are faced with more complex PCBs, they are "coming in from the cold" and turning into real, paying customers so that they can get product upgrades, documentation, and technical support. They become willing to pay for upgrades, because they need the latest tools to get their increasingly complex designs done correctly and on time. To develop new end products, serious designers find it is well worth the price to become legitimate.
Altium recently released Protel DXP (Design Explorer), which integrates the different design technologies the company has acquired over the past few years. This new product puts a full range of PCB design capabilities within a single design environment -- schematic entry, SPICE mixed-signal circuit simulation, rules-driven board layout, signal integrity analysis, topological autorouting, and manufacturing output -- at a low upgrade price.
Smaller, More Complex
Another good reason to invest in advanced tools comes from Zuken, which recently announced Board Modeler, a new PCB solution that resolves electromechanical problems and reduces the number of iterations between electrical and mechanical design processes. Board Modeler provides a concurrent, collaborative floor planning environment that can import and export information from schematics, PCB layout, and mechanical design tools.
Its new methodology eliminates duplication of effort between electronic and mechanical design by permitting the electrical designer to import board outlines, pre-placed parts, and other obstacles directly from mechanical CAD tools. Board Modeler then exports the PCB outline and shape, pre-placed components, and other mechanical constraints to the PCB layout.
Following PCB placement, the design is imported to Board Modeler's 3D environment, where the simplified shapes normally found in a 2D PCB layout system are replaced with accurate 3D component models from Zuken's online library of over 5 million components.
So while it is inappropriate for me, of all people, to criticize piracy, the transition to legitimacy does represent progress.
by Rita Glover
(October 2002 Issue, Nikkei Electronics Asia)
It seems we later took a step forward on a path to legitimacy. When I lived in Boston, Massachusetts, I discovered another John Glover, a naval general in the American Revolution in the 1770s and founder of the US Marines.
Now here I am in 2002, chalking up a twenty-year career of tracking the electronic design automation industry. And still yet, there are many instances of piracy; which set me to thinking about the effects, both short- and long-term.
I recently talked to Bruce Edwards, executive director of Altium, the Australian supplier of printed circuit board (PCB) software. The company was founded in 1985 under the name Protel and changed its name to Altium a few years ago after a series of mergers.
Non-Paying Copies
In its early years, Protel's legacy PCB product was pirated into China and Taiwan. At first, this caused the company great concern, because it might sell only one product into these regions and have many non-paying copies proliferated from that single copy. Protel sent in its distributors to negotiate with the pirates, but they were rebuffed.
Finally, after many years of feeling helpless, Protel found that the piracy actually had some benefits. In October 2001, Gartner Dataquest surveyed China and ranked Protel (Altium) as the country's most popular EDA vendor in terms of tool usage and customer awareness, even though the company ranks fifth in terms of market share. (Note that when this China study was repeated in 2002, the awareness of Altium (Protel) had dropped by about half, probably due to the company's name change.)
Today, Edwards said, "We now attribute much of our popularity in Asia to piracy." The company realizes that it was a blessing in disguise, because it got the product into the hands of users and the educational system in the region.
Edwards said that over time, as these designers are faced with more complex PCBs, they are "coming in from the cold" and turning into real, paying customers so that they can get product upgrades, documentation, and technical support. They become willing to pay for upgrades, because they need the latest tools to get their increasingly complex designs done correctly and on time. To develop new end products, serious designers find it is well worth the price to become legitimate.
Altium recently released Protel DXP (Design Explorer), which integrates the different design technologies the company has acquired over the past few years. This new product puts a full range of PCB design capabilities within a single design environment -- schematic entry, SPICE mixed-signal circuit simulation, rules-driven board layout, signal integrity analysis, topological autorouting, and manufacturing output -- at a low upgrade price.
Smaller, More Complex
Another good reason to invest in advanced tools comes from Zuken, which recently announced Board Modeler, a new PCB solution that resolves electromechanical problems and reduces the number of iterations between electrical and mechanical design processes. Board Modeler provides a concurrent, collaborative floor planning environment that can import and export information from schematics, PCB layout, and mechanical design tools.
Its new methodology eliminates duplication of effort between electronic and mechanical design by permitting the electrical designer to import board outlines, pre-placed parts, and other obstacles directly from mechanical CAD tools. Board Modeler then exports the PCB outline and shape, pre-placed components, and other mechanical constraints to the PCB layout.
Following PCB placement, the design is imported to Board Modeler's 3D environment, where the simplified shapes normally found in a 2D PCB layout system are replaced with accurate 3D component models from Zuken's online library of over 5 million components.
So while it is inappropriate for me, of all people, to criticize piracy, the transition to legitimacy does represent progress.
by Rita Glover
(October 2002 Issue, Nikkei Electronics Asia)
