Taken for Granted

Today (Monday November 2, 2009) I attended a special session held alongside ICCAD 2009 at the Doubletree Hotel. Paul McLellan and Jim Hogan presented some ideas on What EDA needs to change for 2020 success to a group of 25-30 people including several who blog on EDA related topics. There was a bit of discussion of the ideas presented although only a few of the attendees made comments, which was a shame.   Paul and Jim’s presentations are here, courtesy of Si2.

The biggest idea, agree on both by Paul and Jim, was that design is going to change to a “Software Signoff”, reminiscent of the earlier change to an “RTL signoff”, and that EDA is going to have to follow this change to survive. The role of FPGA in design and the growth of complex processor-centric FPGA design were also highlighted, although I asked whether there was real data that as ASICs and ASSPs decline in numbers and complex FPGAs rise, are the EDA dollars/yen/yuan/Euros following the shift? Unfortunately, there still seems to be a lack of hard data here and thus this still comes across as a prediction of change more than a revealed change.

The other thing I noticed is that most of the questions and comments, and diversions, seemed to come from people with a hardware-EDA focus, not a software focus at all (with perhaps my friend Frank Schirrmeister being an exception, and maybe myself, although I live in both worlds at once). This makes me wonder if EDA will just wither away into a small core group of tools used for the hardware design flow and linked closely to the fabs that remain, and that the new design tools of the future will come from a very different source. Certainly a hardware-focused EDA industry does not “get” software, which was commented on at the forum – and companies like VaST, for example, don’t participate in EDA related events because it does not seem relevant to their users.

Perhaps an ICCAD is just not the right forum for such a discussion because of its hard-core EDA/hardware focus. Although I later helped do an embedded tutorial on Embedded Processors, Methods and Applications: Computer Architects Perspective, with Sri Parameswaran and Anand Raghunathan that drew about 40 people to hear about primarily SW and architecture-centred topics – which was welcome.

As I have said before, I’m no Nostradamus, and predicting the future is beyond my ken, but something has to change in EDA, as the two speakers concluded. What will that be?