Standards

I was once at a standardization meeting many years ago when a friend of mine leaned over and said, “I tend to be against standards, they just perpetuate other people’s mistakes.” I think this is really a criticism of standardizing too early. You can only standardize something once you already know how to do it well.

In many businesses, the winner needs to be clear before the various stakeholders will move. Standards are one way for a critical mass of companies to agree on the winner. For example, Philips and Sony standardized the CD for audio and since it was the only game in town it was adopted immediately by vendors of CD players, the record labels knew which format to put discs out in, the people building factories to make the CDs knew what to make. A few years earlier there had been the first attempt to make videodiscs, but there were three or more competing formats. So everyone sat on their hands waiting for the winner to emerge, and in the meantime everything failed. When everyone tried again a few years later, the DVD standard was hammered out, it was the winner before it shipped a single disk, and the market took off. This was a lesson that seemed to have been lost in the HD-DVD vs BlueRay wars, although by then disks were starting to be irrelevant and downloading and streaming movies is clearly going to be the long-term winner.

EDA is an interesting business for standards. Since you can only standardize something you already know how to do, standards are useless for anything leading edge. By the time we know how to do something, the first batch of tools is out there using whatever interfaces or formats the initial authors came up with. Standardization, of the IEEE variety, lags far behind and serves to clean up the loose ends on things where there are already de facto standards. Also, EDA market expansion is not going to be driven by standards in the way that CDs were. Synopsys won synthesis (as opposed to Trimeter, Silc, Autologic and others) and so .lib and sdc became the standards, not the other way round. If all the other EDA companies had created a competing standard to .lib, nobody would have cared. It is the winningness not the standardization that is important.

Once the first tools are out there for some new technology, all using incompatible formats, then standard wars begin. The market leader wants its standard to become the de facto standard adopted by everyone. It is cheap for them since they don’t need to make changes; it is expensive for everyone else since they need to change their software to read the standard and probably make some internal changes so that their tool’s semantics match those implicit in the standard. Even if an IEEE-style standardization effort takes place, it is too slow. By the time the standard comes out it has often already been superseded by upgrading of the formats by the market leader to accommodate the realities of the process nodes that have come along in the meantime.

Customer behavior is very two-faced too. Every semiconductor vendor will talk about the importance of standards with a long solemn face. Especially their CAD managers. But, at least for their leading edge chips, they won’t put any money behind those statements and they will buy the best tool for the job whatever standards it does and does not support. Designing leading-edge chips is hard enough without worrying about whether some abstract standard is open enough.

Of course, once a market matures then supporting the de facto standard is an important part of “best tool for the job”. When I first started in EDA, Calma still maintained that GDSII was a proprietary standard that nobody else was allowed to read. However, every Calma system shipped with a file describing the format, so I took the legally dubious step of reading that file, and a couple of days later we could read chips into the VLSI Technology layout editor. A layout editor that didn’t read GDSII wasn’t really a layout editor no matter how good it was at editing layout.

So expect customers and EDA vendors going forward to talk a lot about how important standards are. But expect them to produce and buy the best tool for the job and the standard to emerge from the competition for that honor.