There’s always a lot going on in the electronic design industry, but recently it seems particularly active.  It’s become a routine of mine to cruise the news feeds we bring into Xuropa to get a sense of what’s going on at different points in the value chain.

Here is a brief snapshop of what I saw today

Embedded Systems

Looking to the embedded world, there’s an interesting “the news of my demise is greatly exaggerated” post over at the Windows Embedded Blog.  After comments about how little Windows CE gets mentioned and a recent New York Times article focuses on Windows 7 for a “small world”, there was some “divining” (”wishing”?) going on in the blogosphere.

According to Mike Hall of Microsoft, they’re hard at work on a new release of the OS right now.  Hopefully it fixes all of the bugs that I ran into during my fated experience with it on the HTC Dash.  (Bad, bad memories.)

Bringing the methodology and tools of application level software and hardware platform development closer together appears to be paramount when the two are developed by different companies.  A point made by Jim Hogan in an interview with Ed Sperling.

Consumer Industry

Although news of the change in fortune of Steve Job’s health last week was sad, the amount of coverage it received was staggering.  Everywhere I turned my radio “dial” on the day of the announcement had it every 15 to 20 minutes.  Even the BBC was running it as the top or second news summary item throughout the day.

Now that the dust has settled and the reality of the situation has started to set in, speculation on succession has begun.  The clear lesson for the electronic design industry is the process of succession itself.  The development of a deep management bench and the instilling of a clear direction and set of corporate values are paramount.

EDA Industry

It was a breath of fresh air to read that OneSpin have spun their technology into a family of interoperable formal verification products.  The real news was the emphasis on usability they appear to have taken.  This is an excellent example of a company that has listened to their customer, really understood the reason for slower-than-liked adoption, and then has done something about it.

Too many EDA companies believe that it’s just “one more feature” that will make all the difference in the world.  When in reality it’s the usability of the features they already have and the company’s ability to communicate the value of them that’s at fault.

This reminds me of Beach Solutions, who unfortunately met their demise late last year.  They struggled for years with confusing messaging and a technology lead.  By the time the products were packaged into something comprehensible to the customer, and the emphasis was moved from “what it is” to “what it does”, it was too late.  They’d managed to go from little-to-no engagements to evaluations all over the globe in a matter of months.  Unfortunately the EDA sales process and the waning world economy appear to have taken their toll.

The curious thing is the acquisition by Duolog.  Given that their new marketing at DAC 2008 was almost identical to Beach’s one would have thought they didn’t need the Beach technology.

There are some more sobering words and grim interpretations about the industry from Gabe Moretti over at EDA Design Line. 

Semiconductor Woes

ChipMOS files a lien against Spansion inventory and equipment for the $18M it is owed.  That’s a tremendous amount of money in any economy, and a sure sign of trouble when vendors start suing customers.  There’s also a rumor that Spansion may file Chapter 11.

Technology Sector Jobs

There was some light at the end of the tunnel reported up in Oregon by Mike Rogoway.  According to his information, tech industry employment figures for Oregon improved in December.  He also has a tally of tech job losses in the state.  I wonder if someone is keeping score in Silicon Valley.

EDA Investment & Value

There was a great interview by Ed Sperling of Jim Hogan.  He covered many macro-level aspects of the EDA industry from the business model, technical challenges, and industry make-up.  More on this interview here.

Posted under business, industry, marketing

The writing on the wall just keeps on getting writ larger.

It keeps feeling like deja vu every time I listen to Jim Hogan describe the status of the EDA industry and what needs to be done to move it forward.  He’s been saying it for years, and everyone needs to be listening very closely.

The full interview is here over at Ed Sperling’s blog, but here’s a summary. (The punchline is at the end.)

It was interesting to hear when Ed asked Jim what the missing technology pieces are within EDA.  Jim answered:

• System level knowledge (ie. the end markets)
• Software knowledge (ie. how to support scalable software design practices)
• Supply chain management

Notice something?  It’s not about technology!  For progress to be made within EDA, the emphasis needs to be on the business of electronic design and how systems are developed.

Incorporation of software development into EDA: 

Embedded RTOS and protocols are available, predictable and commodities; the challenge is at the application level and being able to predict behavior there.  The industry as a whole has little to no exposure at this level.

Does Jim see a merger of two worlds:

There are too few players that have worked both sides to make this feasible.  There needs to be greater interoperability and mutual sign-off between the development flows.

Acquisitions:

EDA buys a software company?  No.  Collaboration more likely.  IP company aggregation more likely within EDA; especially as it relates to distribution.

Are there bargains out there: 

The business rules have changed.  Asset purchases are more likely rather than out-and-out M&A (re. Beach IP acquisition).  In the past valuations were the stumbling block in Private-Private acquisitions.  But given the current environment this will become less of a hurdle.

The Value that EDA Provides:

The value is not in EDA as it is traditionally thought of at all.  For EDA companies to build value and move forward they need to take on more of what their customers currently do themselves.  ie. instead of just providing tools, EDA needs to become more of a “General Contractor”.

Here are some ways that EDA could move forward in the value chain, with some ideas that I’ve added in:

• License sub-systems and not just IP cores

There are examples of this, such as MIPS.  They have their platform strategy, but from what I’ve been able to tell, it hasn’t met with too much success.  As before, this likely has more to do with everything around the IP rather than the IP itself.

• Do more of the design for the customer…maybe the whole design

Jim talked about this a bit in the interview.  Some companies are doing this.

• Outsourced CAD

This builds upon the concept of SaaS and Cloud Computing that I’ve talked about in the past.  Essentially, if EDA companies take on directly the maintenance and provision of the CAD team by providing their technology through SaaS/Cloud Computing models they’d be adding value to the customer while removing some of their Capex and Opex outlays.  That should be a whole heck of a lot of value to capitalize upon.

• System Level design and development

This comes back to ESL, but it needs to be approached from the perspective of how systems are designed instead of how EDA tools are used and by whom.  Again, it’s not the technology, but the use model and business models.

In summary, for the business of EDA to grow it needs to focus on two things:

1. The business of EDA
2. The way systems are developed

Posted under business, industry, marketing

Recently, everywhere I look there is news and more news on how about the economy is doing.  I constantly read about layoff, company closings, etc.  And I hear about it in all sectors.  If someone doesn’t by now know about what’s going on, he or she probably just doesn’t want to know.

The press is treating the economy just as it does with any other sensational news.  And I understand sensationalism:  Many times in my career, press was going out of their way to hail my company and at times me, myself, and couldn’t stop reporting the great subjects.  Nevertheless, as soon as a bit of market momentum was lost, press was all over how bad we were doing - often making it sound like we won’t be in business for more than a couple of weeks.  Yes, I have see the quick turn with my own eyes many times.  Needs to say, these negative stories about the companies (even when we were doing much better than OK), leads to loss of key employees and more importantly key customers as they just believe what the read, or at least what they read significantly affects their purchase decisions.

Negative news is destructively self-fulfilling.  It’s no surprise that the announcement of layoffs everywhere, doesn’t help but encourage companies to invest less in workforce, which leads to lack of productivity, and eventually to more cuts.

I am a big proponent of free press.  I am also a huge proponent of free market (and less/no intervention of government in business).  Nevertheless, I very well see the point of having a stimulus package and how it could help re-vitalize the economy.  At the same time, I believe, if the government is to interfere with free market, it would behoove us all if it could also drive some sort of “management” (and I use that term very carefully) on press.  I do realize that this is very dangerous, but I strongly believe as long as the sensationalism of news is out there, making a recovery would take longer than it could.  Bad news always sells better than good news.

The stimulus package will help the economy.  We now need a disciplined, non-sensationalist press “package”to reinvigorate the recovery itself.  I’m not suggesting to lie or suppress the bad news, I’m just asking not to blow things out of proportions.

Posted under business, industry, marketing

We’ve just completed a new video providing a summary of some of the features of the Xuropa Online Electronic Design Community.  The biggest challenge was keeping the video short and choosing which features to highlight. 

The only way to really understand exactly what the Xuropa Community is about and what it can do for you is to register and sign-in.  But for those that would like to “look before they leap” - enjoy:

Here’s the transcript:

“Unlike any other online community, the Xuropa community is dedicated to the entire electronic design industry.  It has been designed and built for electronic design professionals by electronic design professionals.

Among the many tools Within this select community you can:

1. Use actual electronic design software to learn new skills or consider new tool acquisitions

Online Lab Learning and Exploration Environment

2. View and navigate the industry and your network as a visual map

The Industry Mapped Around You

3. See what news is hot to read through a peer voting tool

Peer Voting Tool Filters Hot News to the Top

4. Gain recognition for your experience and expertise within the industry.

Within a Xuropa Online Lab you gain access to actual electronic design tools for you to use diretly via your web browser.  There are no downloads, no installations and no configuration necessary.  Within an Online Lab, in this case it is the Cadence MIPI Verification Lab, you have the tool and all of the related documentation at your fingertips.  Use this area to learn about a new protocol, a new tool and verification methodology.  You can also use this environment to evaluate the products in your consideration for licensing them from the vendor.  Again, without the need to install anythng on your local workstation.

We put you at the center of the electronic design industry.  Based upon your professional profile, we map all of the electronic design professionals within the community.  This way you can see those people with similar backgrounds who might be interesting to network with.  You can also begin to understand the portability of your skills and specializations into different fields and domains.

To do this we go further than any other online networking tool.  Within your Xuropa Professional Profile you add Specializations, such as RTL Design Verification or System Level Architect.  You can also add specific skills, such as protocols, software languages or verification methodologies.

News articles are brought in from all over the web and ranked by the number of views and the number of votes each has received.  We also categorize each article into different fields so you can focus on the important news of the day.  You can also browse industry news feeds that you select in your customized feed view.

In today’s economic environment it is crucial that you’re able to differentiate yourself and be recognized for your expertise.  Within Xuropa you can do this by writing reviews of products and technology you have used or developed.  These are linked to your Professional Profile.  If you don’t have time to write a review you can quickly share your experience by rating products and technology

These is just a short summary of the types of tools available to you within the Xuropa Online Community.

Click here to register for the Xuropa Online Electronic Design Community.

Posted under Features, Xuropa

Now that 2009 is well underway, I took a quick look at Xuropa membership registrations and the high-level makeup of the Xuropa community. 

Up until the end of last year, there was a pretty even split between the number of people that registered under the different electronic design fields (EDA, IP, Semiconductor, Software, and System).   The proportion of professionals that associated themselves with the Semiconductor and EDA fields were a little bit ahead, but not by much. 

Over the past few weeks this has changed.  Here’s the split as of today:

System: 17%
Software: 17%
Semiconductor:47%
IP: 13%
EDA: 41%

Considering the relative size of the Semiconductor segment in terms of employees I would expect this profile to become more pronounced.  You can see this breakdown for yourself within the Community area of the platform.

Posted under Community

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

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

While doing some research recently I was amazed to find that there isn’t a single complete and accurate listing of all of the tools available in the EDA industry.  Did I miss something?

Gary Smith has a list of companies and where they fit within the design flow.  While a good starting point, there are no tools and unfortunately the list is “frozen in amber” as a pdf file.  There is a partial lists over at OCP-IP, but again it is semi-frozen as a static html page.

But of course, to build and maintain a list of the hundreds of development tools in the industry would be a monumental task!  Add in all of the new IP and embedded software tools and to accurately maintain this list would be a full-time job for quite a few people!

This is where the power of the community can leveraged!

There is an open, member-editable catalog of technology within the Xuropa Online Community.  Anyone can add a favorite tool, piece of IP or a chip or system.  A start has been made, but it needs your help!

Sign-in to the Xuropa Platform here and from the landing page go to Products>Add Product in the drop down menus.

The electronic design technology landscape is too dynamic for a static catalog, but together we can make a member managed catalog to bring greater visibility and understanding to the industry.

Register a product you’ve used or developed and be recognized as a contributor!

Posted under Features, industry, marketing