Seven issues the EDA industry needs to address:

1. Put innovation and customers first, not Wall Street. If you innovate and make a product that’s worthwhile, revenue will follow, the Street will follow, and, investors may be pleased.
   
   
2. Don’t sell yourself and the industry short. EDA is a difficult field and should warrant a premium price. If EDA is imploding, it is largely because companies hit the panic button and began offering customers all-you-can-eat-buffet licensing. Although you may be hitting your numbers in the short term, in the end, you are doing a disservice to yourself and the industry, dissuading start-ups from innovating and venture capitalists from funding them. In the long run, this approach also hurts customers.
   
   
3. Big companies need to embrace start-ups and the growth-by-acquisition strategy. Most big EDA companies believe that, if they stop paying 10 times more revenue for EDA start-ups, EDA entrepreneurs will work for the big EDA vendors and innovate in-house. The fact is that most big EDA innovations come from start-ups. Again, EDA is a difficult and highly specialized field. The biggest tool innovations usually start with one grad student devoting his entire academic life to solving one problem. Architects at most big EDA companies are too busy upgrading yesterday’s tools to think deeply about tomorrow’s problems. Thus, if you don’t support the start-up model, you’re killing the industry’s future.
   
   
4. The EDAC (EDA Consortium) should not confuse IP (intellectual property) with EDA. Please, get rid of IP in MSS (Market Statistics Service) reports and compare apples-to-apples numbers—good, old EDA. If a governing body were looking into your statistics, you’d have some explaining to do. Maybe MSS could create a separate report for the IP industry if it is that desperate for new sources of member funding.
   
   
5. A lot of people think lawsuits hurt the EDA industry when, in fact, stealing does more damage. Stop stealing and stop complaining when EDA companies sue other companies for taking their property. Avanti Chief Executive Officer Gerry Hsu set a precedent that you can build a company on stolen property, use that stolen property to get a head start on the competition, and, even if the courts find you guilty, walk away a multimillionaire. Vendors shouldn’t encourage this practice, and, after the courts have handed down a decision, consumers shouldn’t, either. (If you think IP theft is no big deal, wait a few years; chances are that it will likely hurt you, too).
   
   
6. Embrace the esoteric aspect of the EDA industry. The business press doesn’t understand EDA, because EDA is too esoteric. If the business press one day begins to understand EDA, it likely means you aren’t doing your jobs well enough. Or, perhaps one day, it will mean that EDA has grown large enough to accommodate another analyst and perhaps an opposing opinion to Gary Smith’s group at Gartner-Dataquest, which is currently the only analyst group covering EDA.
   
   
7. EDA needs to work on a new slogan. When I moved from EE Times to EDN, I picked up the FPGA beat and was surprised to learn that the FPGA industry posts lower revenue than the EDA industry and has more than five industry analysts covering it. Maybe EDAC can leverage that data point and take pride in the fact that EDA posts higher revenue while getting only half the business-press coverage the FPGA industry gets. In fact, if EDAC wants to shelve the slogan “EDA: where electronics begins,” it should replace it with “Did you know we’re bigger than the FPGA industry?” Better yet, instead of always coming across as the forgotten child of the electronics family, EDA should adopt a haughty attitude and slogan to match—maybe something like “We’re way above your head!” That’s sure to grab some attention.