EDA is an outsourcing business, an estimated $5Billion and counting. This has been an evolutionary path and one that has followed the maturing of the EDA industry.
In the 1960s, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) developed and owned all the tooling. Everything was done in house, nothing was outsourced. This was the original turnkey model. A lot of money was poured into research by the big companies (OEMs in particular) and the tools were not commercially available. Eventually the tools were commercialized but not the research.
Design inflection points usually drive a new generatio......

Its that time of year again... DAC is around the corner with its line up of tutorials, panels, mini workshops, keynotes and paper presentations. In this post I want to talk about two "non technical workshops" that happen at DAC.

In addition to being the primary conference for the EDA industry, DAC also offers something for the non-techie attendee- The first is a workshop called "Introduction to Chips and EDA for a non technical audience". After all, to look at just one example, the big 4 companies in the EDA world employ hundreds of people whose expertise is in fields other than engineering and......

Many industries consolidate as they mature. The consolidation most often happens from within. Sometimes consolidation might take the path of mergers with or acquisitions by software providers in adjacent  markets. The embedded software industry  has certainly seen its share of consolidations through mergers and acquisition since the 1990s. For example, Diab Data was acquired by Integrated Systems which then became the second largest company in the commercial embedded software market, till it in turn was acquired by Wind River Systems in 1999.
So far so good......

Multicore means everything or nothing depending on your position in the semiconductor foodchain. Ofcourse since the real world in not bi-polar, there are always areas of grey in between, where you could be multi-something and still be a player in the world of multicore design. Last week's multicore expo had vendors coming from various parts of the design and manufacturing chain who all claimed to be have a multicore or multicore related solution in some shape or form.

The multicore expo has been growing steadily since it first started up 3 or 4 years ago, both in terms of participants in the e......

Turning to the Internet as the one of the first stops on the road to finding information in EDA is so prevalent these days, it is not surprising that the established print magazines are all spending a lot more time and money on fine tuning their online strategies. Granted EDN, EETimes and Electronic Design among others still exist in print format but I have to wonder sometimes how much longer I can hope to get these magazines in the mail. For those of you who would like an inside look at what is happening in the world of EDA publishing, Brian Fuller's blog offers an interesting peek at publishing in gen......

EDA has experimented with different types of hosted application services since the dot com days. Cadence's recent announcement that it plans to offer some tools through the hosted application model suggests that once again EDA is approaching the world of hosted software. Cadence is no stranger to the world of hosted software and indeed could even be called a pioneer of sorts. Back in the days of the nascent world wide web, EDA companies were testing different ways to approach new business models that would allow them to deploy software as a hosted service. The majority of these attempts howev......

January is just around the corner and with it comes a new EDAC forecast panel with prognostications for 2009. Looking back over the past three years, EDA recovered from a slump in 2005 achieving 10% growth in both 2006 and 2007. 2008 has turned out to be a challenge.

The original expectation was that the growth trend would continue and EDA would see a double digit growth year for a third year in a row. The primary drivers of growth would be semiconductor and systems companies retooling for the next node. Forecasts issued in early 2008, by research companies for semiconductor industry growth, we......

As Wally Rhines, CEO of Mentor Graphics, recently pointed out, EDA has a lower correlation with GDP than other sectors of the economy such as consumer discretionary spending or automobiles. EDA does however have a high correlation with Semiconductor R & D investment and capex with approximately 30% of EDA revenue coming from semiconductor R & D spending. Chip companies and foundries have been hit hard in the current recession, as evidenced by the shortfall in earnings being announced by all and sundry. Nokia and others (Apple is an exception) are announcing lower sales of cell phon......