|
Photo: Courtesy of IBM, posted at EE Times

The demonstration showed 100GHz operation at room temperature with a production goal of 1THz.

This is funded by DARPA the folks who really created the Internet.

We need to add Silicon-Carbide (SiC) to our vocabulary.

An interactive workshop with angel investor Jim Hogan and start up executive Paul McLellan

Dire predictions about the death, stagnation or maturation of EDA are premature, says noted angel investor Jim Hogan, a major shaper and influencer of the EDA industry.  He and cohort Paul McLellan actually see lucrative opportunities in EDA.   Startup founders just need to see end-product design trends and find problems to solve that’ll appear in the next 18-24 months.

Come to this workshop and hear how to get a startup going in EDA.     Get Jim and Paul’s take on what areas in EDA and IP are potentially successful – and those areas that won’t yield a reasonable return on your efforts.

Talk to Jim and Paul about the process of starting up an EDA company – what the angel investment process is, what to expect, how to figure out your exit strategy.

When?

Tuesday

February 23, 2010

6:30 – 7:30 pm

@ DVCon  (DVCon registration not required)

Where?

DoubleTree Hotel

Oak Ballroom

2050 Gateway Place

San Jose, CA  95110

1-408-453-4000

RSVP to:

Liz Massingill

Mentor finally acknowledged the same conclusion as Carey Robertson just wrote about this today.

It appears that Mentor is writing their own 3D field solver instead of just buying one of the many niche tools already on the market.

What I learned from Physware was that the 3D Field Solver market is dominated by companies that have superstar developers with Ph.D. degrees and have been published in technical journals.

All the best to Mentor in their 3D field solver journey.

Ron Wilson of EDN has a good summary of Q3 2009 noting that revenue was down 3.3% compared to Q3 2008.

Typical explanations for a decline in EDA revenue include:

• Decreasing number of ASIC starts
• Increasing number of FPGA starts (where tools are free to low-cost)
• Tight budgets at IC design firms, making do with old tools
• Increased use of IP instead of designing from scratch
• Reluctance of IC design companies to use the newest, small geometry nodes, because the older nodes are more cost effective
• Lingering global recession
• Business models of EDA companies to license “all you can eat” deals have diluted the value of tools

My personal hope is that device physicists invent a replacement for silicon-based CMOS.

I’ll never forget the transition from NMOS (which was burning up chips) to CMOS, and I’d love to see this new generation of nano-technology design continue to eclipse our limited imaginations. This new device technology will certainly require a new generation of EDA tools, then we’ll see the good-old days return to EDA revenue.

Cybereda is the latest start-up EDA company to offer parallel SPICE technology with a tool named PCSIM. The claims sound reasonable, about a linear speed-up as you add more cores or CPUs to your design.

An 8-core version of PCSIM leaves commercial SPICE in the dust:

Right now the company web site talks about how great their tool is however we don’t hear from any customers yet, so stay tuned to learn how this parallel SPICE tool will compete with other earlier entrants, like:

• FineSim SPICE (Magma)
• HSPICE multi-thread (Synopsys)
• Spectre APS (Cadence)
• GSim (Gemini – still independent or acquired?)
• RASER (Infinisim)
• Omega Sim (Nascentric – now defunct, assets purchased by a customer)
• SmartSpice (Silvaco)
• Eldo (Mentor)
• Agilent (Agilent ADS), Agilent (NVIDIA GPUs)

Berkeley DA is hiring a parallel software developer in India, so expect another competitor in 2010.

Most 3D field solvers are slow (compared to pattern-matching) and quickly consume RAM which then limits the practical capacity to cells or small blocks.

Silicon Frontline saw this opportunity and announced products earlier this year to address 3D extraction (F3D) and 3D resistance for power devices (R3D). I spoke today with Dermott Lynch of Silicon Frontline to get an update since August 2009.

Canesta sees value in using F3D for their line of 3D image sensors. It saves them time from having to build a test chip and make measurements, now they can simulate with confidence.

Aptina is a second image sensor design company using the F3D tool to shave 4 months off their product schedules using simulation with accurate parasitics.

Designs requiring this high accuracy include: SRAM, DRAM, Flash, image sensors, ADC.

In evaluations there is always the question of a reference for accuracy comparisons so the venerable QuickCap and Raphael tools are often used. F3D compares well with these reference tools then really shines when you turn on the manufacturing effects.

In 2010 you can expect to see:

• Endorsements from foundries
• Speed improvements
• Two new products

This EDA company has found a niche in offering fast and accurate 3D extraction and a growing list of customers.

Doing some research on each of these phones reveals a common weakness – short battery life. The Droid or iPhone battery can last a mere 4 hours with just a few emails, phone calls and minutes of web surfing.

Being a real enthusiast for efficiency I’ve decided to pass on getting one of these phones for right now however the question remains – why is the battery life so short?

It could be just a case of the marketing department adding too many features that all consume power:

• Huge screens
• WiFi
• Navigation
• Music
• Video
• Email
• Web browsing
• Bluetooth

Some people think that the power issue will be resolved with the next release of the operating system, so that it auto detects how you are using the Smartphone and aggressively manages power to keep the device running for the maximum time.

I’m wondering if these phone companies did any high-level simulations of power consumption?

Are there EDA simulators that would predict power consumption on a complete consumer electronic device like the Droid or iPhone?

Did the marketing departments ignore the battery life issue?

How will engineering produce a longer living Smartphone?

EDA could add some real value here in helping the system-level designers of Smartphones to get extended life out of a single battery charge.

Even the foundries could add some value by offering a process with lower leakage currents, and lower switching power.

When Microsoft introduced Vista they assumed that the installed base of XP users would be excited to try something new and better. Well, history showed something like only 25% of the installed XP based dared to even try Vista after all of the horror stories about driver incompatibilities, bugs, increased memory usage, slow response, and lack of compelling new features.

When Microsoft figured out that Vista bombed in the marketplace they wisely renamed the successor Windows 7, no mention of that failed “Vista” to be ever spoken of again.

From a technology perspective Windows 7 will look and feel totally familiar to any Vista user. In fact, most all of your Vista drivers and applications will simply work in Windows 7. Marketing named this “Windows 7″ when it feels like Vista that starts a bit faster, and closes quicker. Oh, yes, they did add more eye candy, and some new features. In the next one year of use I will not be more productive than the time it took me to install Windows 7.

Let’s get back to EDA now and talk about Mentor Graphics and the Falcon Framework. This unified framework was supposed to make all of my EDA point tools look and feel the same, use the same database, and just make me more productive. History showed that the release of 8.0 was 2 years late and failed to deliver on it’s promises, so Mentor was knocked down in the revenue rankings.

Today at Mentor the word “Falcon” is not uttered, just like “Vista” is not talked about at Microsoft.

Mentor learned its lesson and now works with industry standards groups and adds value by being compatible and working in EDA flows. Examples include:

• OpenAccess and OASIS for Calibre
• BSIM3/4 models and HSPICE netlists for Eldo and ADiT
• VHDL/Verilog standards for ModelSim
• SPIRIT Consortium, OSCI
• etc

A handful of Mentor tools still use the Falcon Framework technology (Design Architect, IC Station, …) however all new tools in the last decade avoid it.

Now if Microsoft could just build a web browser that conformed to W3C standards, or if W3C would at least have the power to enforce the standards that are written….

Every quarter for the past several years I would read almost the same press release from Apache, “record sales, still profitable”. Apache is my favorite EDA poster child for success.

They’ve worked hard to carve out a niche for themselves in the EDA space. I think that they could add a few more point-tool companies and expand their product offerings even wider.

I’d love to see Apache merge with a company like SpringSoft because there is no product overlap and it could be good for the industry. Time will tell.

EMA

My only question about this kind of distribution agreement is what happens to channel conflict between Aldec’s existing sales channel and the new EMA channel.

Telesales is alive and well in EDA for tools priced under $30K per seat. OrCAD was a pioneer in making telesales work in the PCB side of EDA.

Altium is another EDA competitor to Aldec in this segment that uses resellers.