Category Archives: eda industry

Magma must die

Actually, it doesn’t need to be Magma. I just agree with Isadore that it would be better for EDA if one of the full-line EDA suppliers went away. Magma is taking on the mantle of sick man of the industry … Continue reading

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He who goes first loses

Earlier we had guest blog entries from Lauro Rizzatti of EVE and Chi-Ping Hsu of Cadence on whether innovation occurs in small or large companies. I’ve always maintained that the problem is a different one. I think it is clear … Continue reading

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Ferrari vs Formula-1

It used to be received wisdom that the way to get a good design flow was for a semiconductor company to purchase best-in-class point tools and then integrate them together themselves. I think there were two reasons for this. First, … Continue reading

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The arrogance of ESL

ESL, or electronic system level design, is a catchall term for tools above the level of RTL. There are two primary aspects to this: synthesis and verification of IC designs from representations higher than RTL (usually untimed C or System-C); … Continue reading

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“The tragedy of the commons” and EDA

The tragedy of the commons is an article published in Science magazine in 1968 by Garrett Hardin. It has since become very well known and is applicable widely when resources are shared without a market. The canonical example is common … Continue reading

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Why is EDA so buggy?

I have sat through numerous keynote speeches by CTOs of semiconductor companies berating the EDA industry for shipping tools that are full of bugs and that are late, not ready enough in advance of the appropriate process node. Of course … Continue reading

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R.I.P.

Small EDA companies seem to be falling by the wayside. Over the Christmas break Blaze DFM (insert cremation joke here) and Liga Systems both reached the end of the line. Blaze will certainly get picked up; it has customers and … Continue reading

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Open source again

The blog entry on open source seems to have generated more comments than anything else. Maybe it’s because all the EDA users want software to be free, and all the EDA producers are worried that it might head in that … Continue reading

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Why EDA differs from ERP in more than two letters

What is it about EDA that makes it different from other software businesses? When the CFO of Texas Instruments buys Oracle or SAP he or she doesn’t study what algorithms they use in their relational database. EDA purchasers are the … Continue reading

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We are fleas on a sick dog

Well it was the annual EDAC CEO panel last night. The quality of the food was much better than normal, but it turned out that this was not because the CEOs were predicting a rich future in 2009 but that … Continue reading

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