Passage to India

By Geoffrey James -- 3/1/2006

Given the close ties of EDA to the U.S.-dominated semiconductor industry, it's not surprising that the major EDA vendors, and most of the minor ones as well, are headquartered in the United States. However, the American character of EDA may not last forever, because, as the semiconductor business becomes more international, EDA's center of gravity has been gradually shifting toward India.

For the past few years, there's been an exodus of R&D out of the United States facilities of the EDA vendors and into their Indian subsidiaries. Cadence, for example, employs 400 R&D engineers in India, while Synopsys and Mentor employ 350 and 300 EDA programmers in India, respectively. To put that in perspective, the combined R&D staff employed by the Big 3 EDA vendors in India is almost half of Cadence's worldwide engineering staff.

Although the majority of the EDA R&D in India is conducted under the aegis of U.S.-based firms, that's not likely to remain true for long, according to Ravi Pai, chairman of SoftJin Technologies, the largest EDA firm headquartered in India. "The main reason for not having many homegrown EDA startups was that there was not enough semiconductor design activity in India until recently," he explains. "With the gradual buildup of a semiconductor ecosystem and better coordination between the semiconductor companies through the newly formed Indian Semiconductor Association, we are seeing conditions emerge for more EDA startups in India," he says.

The outsourcing of IC design work is also driving more EDA R&D into India. According to Anand Anandkumar, managing director at Magma Design Automation India, when the initial 90-nanometer designs were ramping up in 2004, India already employed somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 IC design engineers, accounting for more than five percent of the world total. This number is significant, because semiconductor design and EDA programming are symbiotic disciplines. In any given year, as much as a quarter of the EDA tools in use may be homegrown, according to Gartner Dataquest, and many of those tools are later incorporated into standard products from the EDA vendors. As IC design moves increasingly to India, it's inevitable that EDA development efforts will be moving along with it.

The growing importance of foundries is also a factor. Although at first glance, EDA seems far upstream from manufacturing, as design nodes proceed below 90 nm, EDA tools must be more tightly integrated with each foundry's specific manufacturing processes. In other words, design for manufacturing (DFM) forces foundries to become more involved in EDA. As DFM becomes more crucial to their business models, the foundries (most of which are in China) have a choice: either look to the faraway United States, where hiring an EDA programmer costs big bucks, or look to neighboring India, where an engineer with similar skills can be hired for a fraction of the cost.

Government policy is also driving EDA development to India. The Indian government is actively bootstrapping its local EDA industry, by launching a Special Manpower Development Program to provide extra funding to universities to cultivate and train EDA programmers. By contrast, the U.S. government not only ignores the EDA sector but is also slashing the budgets of organizations that fund research in semiconductor design techniques, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Unfortunately, this malign neglect comes at a time when, overall, the U.S. is losing its competitive advantage in engineering. According to Offshoring Times ( www.offshoringtimes.com), an Indian government-sponsored Web site that provides information to companies looking to outsource in India, U.S. universities are graduating 50,000 engineers a year (of all types) compared to India's 250,000.

This is not to say that all the EDA programmers in the U.S. should be busy learning Hindi. After all, even Magma, the largest EDA firm headed by an Indian executive, is still headquartered in the U.S. But who knows? If current trends continue, it's possible that at some point in the future—perhaps when Moore's Law has once again made today's EDA tools obsolete—we'll be attending the annual Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Bangalore rather than in San Jose.

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