Half-empty, half-full, or new world?

Editorial colleague Ed Sperling may seem a bit serious in person, but he usually has a pretty upbeat way of observing the electronics industry from a high-level vantage point that alleviates panic. Mind you, I’m not talking about the “happy news” blinders that characterized the PR community in periods like the 1999-2000 pre-crash, but an ability to examine the landscape from 30,000 feet and say, “It’s neither as dire nor as dazzling as it seems, but it’ll be OK.”

Sperling’s work with System-Level Design tests that capability to its limits, since he has to report on the EDA community – a market sector that many in the trade press have declared to be all but dead on arrival. Now of course, a decent business remains for Cadence, Mentor, and Synopsys, and specialized startups still bubble up in realms such as timing verification, only to be swallowed up months later. Nevertheless, if one checks into the health of trade shows like DAC and DATE, it’s understandable why many consider the EDA field to be mature (read: boring).

That’s why it was nice to see Sperling take a look at EDA, and the specialized world of IP blocks for FPGAs and ASICs, and declare that all was not gloom and doom. Pay attention to his last two paragraphs on the relation between the boom in FPGAs and the changing role of IP. Early in the last decade, several startups figured they could make money through the licensing of IP blocks, without specifying whether those blocks were going into ASICs, ASSPs, or FPGAs. That’s looking through the wrong end of the telescope, Sperling says. It’s not so much that all IP blocks have to move from soft configuration to hard macros, but it’s important to have elements pre-configured, pre-integrated, and targeted to a particular implementation.

Here at FPGA Gurus, we of course believe that the instantiation for IP should be FPGAs in three cases out of four. But that’s not the important point of Sperling’s upbeat essay. When IP startups were dying left and right, it was popular to declare the business itself dead and buried. Instead, it was redefined, in the same way that EDA itself was redefined.   There’s a lesson here in examining future electronics industry boom-and-bust cycles: If you’re sure an idea has reached its zenith and is dying on the vine, look around again. It may have come back in a different guise.