Opinion: System integration offers high-growth opportunity for EDA

By Rick Lucier, Carbon Design Systems -- Electronic Business, 9/25/2007

I’m often left flat-footed at cocktail parties when asked to explain what industry I work in.  When this happens –– and it often does –– I pull my cell phone out of my pocket and say I work in an industry that enables the creation of these devices.

Without a doubt, the electronic design automation (EDA) industry is one cool place to be.  It’s a small, unheralded community of smart and clever designers who enable things in every day life, from cell phones and computers to DVD players and automobiles.  We’re also among the first to learn about new technological challenges in the world and play a unique role in bringing the benefits of those challenges to the marketplace.

EDA challenges typically emerge as bottlenecks within the overall product design cycle.  Through the years, we’ve learned that the game is to identify the new bottleneck and then apply technology to remove it.  The solution is then polished to enable it to be easily adopted within the design flow.  This process has been repeated many times, fueling growth and new market opportunities.  Past examples range from the introduction of simulation to synthesis and many other technologies.

It’s been three years since I returned to the industry after working in the enterprise software market, and my unwavering perspective is that EDA continues to have plenty to offer. And yet, the complexion of this 25-year old industry is changing due in large measure to modest growth because of EDA’s legacy definition. Further, the larger EDA companies are content to focus on market share rather than market growth. 

Visit any electronics company today and it is obvious that the critical bottleneck to developing products lies outside the realm of traditional EDA software.  Hardware has become more commoditized while more product differentiation is being done in software.  This is easily seen by looking at the composition of most design teams where there are 10 software engineers for every hardware engineer.

Given this reality, the question then becomes:  Can an industry accustomed to hardware challenges move its focus and attention to solve this next bottleneck?  I believe the answer is yes, though it’s not a simple solution.  We’ve learned over the years that EDA changes need to be evolutionary rather revolutionary.  As a result, we will need to see solutions through the eyes of software engineers, while maintaining a strong link to the hardware team.  This will require removing the traditional “hardware tax” on hardware engineers to support the software engineer, while ensuring the solution can be adapted to fit into the existing environment of both.

From the hardware/software vantage point, the EDA market looks much larger and much more complex.  While effort has been spent in this area, the reality of the evolutionary approach requires that the solution fit into existing methodologies for both software and hardware engineers.  This is further complicated by legacy and third-party intellectual property (IP) on the hardware side and existing code on the software side.  Electronic system level (ESL) has made an attempt to solve this problem, but retrofitting existing investment and easing the adoption into proven methodologies has made adoption a long road that may not have an end point.   

EDA has always been a convergence of multiple disciplines involving a high level of expertise in algorithm development, hardware proficiency and software design.  This is what makes EDA exciting and challenging.  Adding a new constituency of software engineers into the mix creates new demands on tools, partnerships and business models, creating the largest challenge that has faced this segment in many years.  It also creates a new growth model for the industry and a means to continue to serve our fundamental goal of allowing our customers to bring increasingly complex products to the masses on time. 

EDA continues to have so much to offer.  Let’s collectively move beyond solely solving the challenges of just the hardware side of the equation and address the newest bottleneck many of our customers are facing:  true system validation.  And then, at the next cocktail party, I still may not be able to better explain what my industry does in terms that anyone can understand, but they can all understand high growth.

Rick Lucier is president and CEO of Carbon Design Systems, based in Waltham, Mass.