An alternative title could be: “Opportunities for the Next Wave in Electronic Design”

Hopefully you caught my last two posts recapping a conversation with Gary Smith.  If not, here they are:

A Breath of Fresh Air: Lunch with Gary Smith, Part 1

Lunch with Gary Smith, Part 2

Having laid the ground work, the next topic of conversation was the most exciting.  We are truly at an important juncture in the industry and this is how Gary described it:

Opportunity #1: Multi-core Support by Embedded Software Vendors

We’ve had multi-core chips for a while now, and it’s really just the beginning.  As Gary put it, if we don’t get multi-core chips working Moore’s Law stops - this is not a hardware problem, but a software problem.  Or put another way, a problem shared by both domains, but the software half of the house is behind the curve.

It’s not so much the putting of more gates on the die, but getting more of the gates working more of the time, at the same time.  Oh, and using less power while doing it.  Among many things, this requires a whole new software development tool chain, most crucially compilers and debuggers.

Apparently in discussions with companies like Green Hills, they haven’t come to grips with the problem and don’t really understand the need.  It would be interesting to hear from someone who has dug below the marketing on Green Hills.  Their press releases talk about supporting multi-core processors, but the MULTI IDE (Integrated Development Environment) description makes it look like “MULTI” refers to the plurality of tools integrated into the IDE and not specific support of multi-core processors.

So, the winners in this space could well be in a garage somewhere in Eastern Europe cranking away on a compiler as we speak.

Anyone out there?

Opportunity #2: Integration of Embedded Software

Closely linked to Opportunity #1, this is an area where EDA could really help itself. The most powerful way to communicate value is through your customer’s customer.  If your products address a need or solve a problem for your customer’s customer, you’ve got a winner.  EDA has never really been very successful at this, which may be the main reason why we have seen little progress in EDA’s share of overall electronic design total revenues.

Bottom line: A company that combines both EDA and Embedded software technology and competence will be ideally placed to take advantage of this growing opportunity.  On the face of it, out of the “Big 3″ Mentor is clearly best placed from a product portfolio perspective.  Mentor acquired the Nucleus OS back in 2002 when they bought Accelerated Technology.

Apparently Mentor “gets it”.  Have you seen this investment paying off?

I asked Gary why the industry hasn’t appeared to really engage Wind River Systems. Apparently they were courted a few years ago, but it didn’t go anywhere - apparently they “didn’t get it”.  They have more proximate issues to address, including the remaking of their immediate market following the success of the open source Linux movement and their subsequent re-positioning of the business as Device Software Optimization.

Gary mentioned that QNX “got it”, and they clearly did.  Back in the ’90’s I worked closely with them as a strategic partner for National Semiconductor.  While a small and feisty independent RTOS vendor they had great technology and an understanding of the importance of the value chain and how crucial a robust ecosystem is to success.  QNX were acquired by Harman in 2004, so that’s probably not going to yield much of an opportunity.

Opportunity #3: The Way we do Business

This came down to the fundamentals of why we built the Xuropa Platform.  Not only do we have technical challenges (moving to a new process node, ESL/RTL integration, etc.), but the electronic design industry is facing perhaps its greatest business challenge.  The global distribution of the electronic design industry supply chain and the sustainability of business models.

Long gone are the days when you could spend a day touring Silicon Valley and “pick-up” all the technology you needed for everything along the electronic design supply chain.  Or network at one of the local watering holes to find an opportunity to sell your IP or EDA tool.

Even within the same company, design teams are distributed all over the globe as companies leverage geographic competitive advantage to remain competitive themselves.  Collectively, we need a distributed “watering hole” where we can find people, products and information to enable the electronic supply chain to operate efficiently.  That is the aim of the Xuropa Platform - to bring the electronic design industry together and make it accessible via your web browser.

Need a resource?  Check out the community and Professional Profiles.  Need some information?  Check out the news feeds, company profiles, product directory or post a request to a forum in a company sponsored Online Booth or Online Suite.  Most importantly, need to experiment with a new tool?  Go to a Xuropa Online Lab and try it out.  No download, no installation, no setup - just your browser and you’re in using the tool seeing if it meets your needs.

Finally, clearly we’ve been straining the EDA business model and it’s time for re-assessment and new ideas.  Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as a  business model for EDA is such an idea and where Gary Smith and I look at things differently perhaps.

Gary’s point was that tool flows need to stay in-house and that they’re “hardened”.  Indeed, that’s the case for now, but I think industry-wide and commercial efforts have put the infrastructure in place for that to not necessarily be the case.  Also, economic necessity will drive greater decoupling and therefore flexibility.  But that’s a whole other post.

That made for quite a lunch and I look forward to our next discussion!

Posted under Xuropa, industry

The previous installment of our lunch with Gary Smith focused on Globalization, Pace and Product Evaluations.  Gary then made a comment that almost seemed like a “throw-away”, but it is a clear indication of where the next era of growth is going to come from - semiconductor vendors will move to solely develop at the Electronic System Level (ESL) and outsource everything from RTL and down.

(This reminded me of a conversation I had with Grant Pierce of Sonics years ago.  We were musing about whether at some point in the future fabless semiconductor vendors wouldn’t go the way of HP - providing brand, distribution, sales and support for products that are developed overseas by different companies.)

We can see the motivation - This approach to development would enable shorter development times through greater parallelization.  It would also enable greater leverage of competitive advantage and the subsequent reduction of costs.

To a certain extent, this is already happening at the sub-system level.  Large semi’s are sub-contracting out blocks and sub-system design and verification already.  Is the spec being handed off as executable ESL models or as paper documents though?  Either way, it makes for a natural progression.  (As Gary noted in 2007, the best example would be the OMAP platform.)

The subsequent discussion moved on to how the electronic design industry really did itself a disservice with it’s (mis-)use of the term “ESL” coined by Gary back in the ’90’s.  (The wikipedia definition link provided appears to be another level of obfuscation and could do with a clean-up.)

Intended as a flag round which to rally and understand concurrent software/hardware design, it instead became a market growth trend that every marketing guy in EDA wanted to hang his business projections on.

This resulted in a lose-lose situation.  Not only was the real opportunity of ESL delayed by (ten?) years, but there was no way the EDA firms were going to meet their forecasts built upon those ESL projections.

To compound the problem, as we go into the era when ESL is to become a broadly accepted hard requirement and present opportunity, the term is misunderstood and loaded with negative connotations.  The industry will need some re-education (or a new term?) to get back to where all those involved are speaking the same language and trust has been re-established.

If this occurs as Gary predicts, we’ll have even greater need to explore solutions to the problems raised in my last post.  This also fits nicely into our next topic and the next post: Opportunities for the Next Wave in Electronic Design.

Posted under industry, marketing

Today at lunch with Gary Smith of Gary Smith EDA it was great to hear someone with not only a positive outlook for electronic design, but an enthusiastic one!  Of course the caveat - you have to be looking at the situation in the right way.

Challenges = Opportunities…and electronic design has a lot of challenges ahead of it.

This was too good not to share.

The conversation wound all over the landscape of the industry, dropping in to focus on some key points: EDA, ESL, and the need for integration with the embedded systems part of the supply chain.  Here are some of the main points of our discussion from memory.  Hopefully I captured them accurately and trust Gary to correct me if I go astray.  I’ve then expanded on some points that we didn’t have time to get to.

As you can imagine, there was a lot to capture and rather than turn a blog-post into a dissertation I’ve split it up.  Come back and see the rest in subsequent posts.

Globalization, Pace and Product Evaluations

The conversation started with a description of how the Xuropa Platform came to be, which lead to a discussion of some important fundamentals.  The electronic design industry is more global and dynamic than it has ever been.  Thus there needs to be a different approach to getting products in front of engineers to educate.  Gary split semiconductor vendors into essentially two camps - those that require a “high-touch” process and those that can be served with a “low-touch” process.

The “high-touch” vendors are the top “30″ that are well known and understood.  The challenge is not so much knowing who to call, but engaging at the right time within their development process.  There’s essentially a three month window when design teams can evaluate new technologies - if that window is missed, you’re done.

I’d add another logistical inhibitor to a smooth process here - group buy-in, or “socialization”.  As tools or IP are acquired by a design group, it is now likely that the group itself is split over multiple geographies.  There are also up-stream and down-stream teams that will be impacted directly or indirectly.  Therefore, we need to accommodate engaging with multiple teams spread out all over the globe as we work to get a new technology to be adopted by a company.

We probably don’t even know most of the “low-touch” semiconductor vendors.  They’re distributed all over the world, and more are coming up all the time.  These smaller providers find new niches to exploit, leverage existing and open source tools and the semiconductor infrastructure that has been built up over the past 50+ years.

Building out an expensive global technical field organization or relying upon regional power-player reps is either not an option for many and not scalable for all.

In summary, we need a new model that meets the following objectives:

1. Enables busy engineers to experiment with new technologies at their work-stations without any hassle.
2. Is globally ubiquitous, ready to go when the engineer is - regardless of location or time-zone.
3. Is scalable and economical.  The new model must operate independently of human resources.  Crucially, it must break the dependency upon the availability and location of Applications Engineers for as much of the process as possible.

This is where Xuropa comes in - as a platform to connect engineers with products globally, 24/7.

Xuropa Online Labs

1. Enable an engineer to use an actual product with no downloads, installations or configuration.
2. Provide access to software tools securely via any web browser, and so by definition the product becomes ubiquitous.
3. Enable remote global training, demonstration and pre-evaluation of technologies.

By making technology available via a Xuropa Online Lab engineers are able to access products in a cost effective manner.  Resources are leveraged globally and focused on those design teams that require a “high-touch” process.

Having said that, the web is not a cure-all.  We still need to have solid business processes to accommodate the new tools.  Also, there still needs to be an on-site evaluation - however when it does occur, the engineer will be better prepared for a smoother and quicker evaluation process.

There was one point in this part of the discussion where we may have a different perspective - how much engineers use the web.  Gary wondered if engineers are not too busy even to use the web.  From what we’ve seen on sites such as LinkedIn (who have over 70,000 semiconductor related members at last count), Design and Reuse and other news sites, engineers are using the web for research, they may be more focused in their activity and not just browsing though.

In part 2: The split between ESL and RTL responsibilities.

Posted under industry