DAC grows in clusters

An interesting pattern that has been developing over the last several years is manifest on the show floor at the Design Automation Conference this week: clustering. You can see it in the product announcements, and much more obviously in the layout of the booths.

On the product side, many attendees this year are not showing new tools. They are instead showing revisions of the shells around their fundamental algorithms to slightly repurpose an existing tool. In many cases, they are showing clusters of existing capabilities, grouped together with new interfaces and given a new name. Not to make light of this—sometimes adding a few interfaces between existing tools can turn a job that’s just not worth the trouble into a powerful capability. But the trend does suggest that we are seeing a consolidation in the tool chain for more mature processes. Unless you are staring into the publicity engine surrounding 28nm and hypothetical 20nm designs, the emphasis seems to be very much on adapting tools to the specific needs of design teams, rather than creating new tools to deal with new process effects.

There is a different kind of clustering on the show floor, which I think is also indicative of a trend. For years, the largest booths at DAC have come from two businesses: the big three (or big four, depending on your definition of big) EDA vendors and the foundries. That is still very much true. But the booth layouts, especially for the foundries, is changing dramatically.

Originally, the big booths were structured rather like fortresses: walled enclosures with a guarded front gate, encompassing a small theater, a lounge, and a cluster of meeting rooms, often with an adjunct or entirely separate demo suite. It was all about the vendor. Today, the booths are more like villages: a central square that still retains the outlines of the fortress, although much of the wall has crumbled, surrounded by a cluster of smaller booths for partners. The TSMC booth, for example, has a very open plan—almost to the extent that it’s hard to identify the main reception area—and a suburb of booths occupied by tool vendors in the reference flows, approved IP vendors, and the like. As one seasoned DAC exhibitor pointed out, the trade-show folks made this arrangement possible by allowing smaller companies to be listed under their own names even if they were taking space in a larger vendor’s layout.

But it’s not just a money-saving convenience. The geography of the DAC floor reflects, as it always has, the topology of the industry. A design today is not a series of merchant transactions between a design team, tool and IP providers, and a foundry. It is a joint development in which all of the parties are not just vendors and emptors, but participants. It takes a village.