EDN Asia recently caught up with Nimish H. Modi, Senior Vice President, Front End Group, Cadence, during his recent visit to India, and spoke with Modi and Jaswinder S. Ahuja, Managing Director, Cadence Design Systems India. Excerpts:
EDN Asia: In the EDA space, how do you compare India with other design destinations in Asia, such as China, Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore?
Cadence: India has a head start over other countries because all major EDA companies such as Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, and Magma started with their Asian operations in India. As of today, there is little EDA design work in Korea and Singapore. In China the design industry has a stronger focus on EDA backend than in India; so China seems better in this segment.
EDN Asia: What challenges and opportunities Cadence sees with design complexities growing, and time-to-market and budget constraints becoming tighter?Cadence: We see huge challenges for customers. Verification, low power, and mixed signal design are the top issues facing customers.
Cadence is the industry leader in providing solutions especially for these areas. There is a paradigm shift needed to improve productivity, predictability, and quality. All of Cadence’s products and solutions are engineered with these in mind. However, verification is the biggest challenge by far faced by our customers and accounts for ~65% of personnel costs. Our approach of providing an open, scalable, methodology-based, metrics-driven verification solution built upon has resonated very strongly with customers. Cadence offers comprehensive support for standards-based solutions, enabling designers full verification capabilities to System C and mixed-HDL designs across both hardware and software simulation environments. Low power is now the top consideration of designers and Cadence has been the thought leader in providing a complete design, implementation and verification low power solution. Mixed signal is fast becoming the next big barrier with analog, mixed signal content typically accounting for just ~10% of the chip area but ~50% of the respins.
EDN Asia: With designs going below 45nm, will the current generation of EDA tools suffice, or will there be a need for altogether different kind of EDA tools?Cadence: Both. In general, the EDA industry has done a good job of getting in front of upcoming technology challenges through a modulation of existing capabilities and addition of some new paradigms. Manufacturability issues are greatly amplified at lower nodes and here we have been advocating a model-based approach v/s the traditional rule-based approach. Cadence has a strong focus on providing manufacturability- and variability- aware sign-off capabilities. Verification is not directly node specific but we do need to deal with increasing complexities driven by integration of heterogeneous functionality. The life of current generation of EDA tools is likely to be greater than before because there appears to be a trend toward remaining at the same node for a longer period, given the higher associated costs of migrating to smaller nodes.
EDN Asia: Do you expect any consolidation in the EDA industry? If yes, please elaborate.Cadence: Continuing economic constraints coupled with customers need for comprehensive, best-in-class, broad-based solutions v/s discrete point tools indicates that the industry is inexorably moving toward consolidation. This would be good for both customers and EDA vendors.
EDN Asia: How has the downturn impacted the EDA industry?Cadence: There are two common behavioral patterns that customers exhibit during downturns: they become risk averse and cost conservative. Both these behavior patterns impact EDA adversely. However, some of the leading edge companies do use the downturn as an opportunity to further differentiate themselves and come out stronger by investing more aggressively in EDA tools to help them further push the technology envelope.
EDN Asia: How have SAAS and cloud computing impacted EDA applications?Cadence: These are emerging, promising trends. Cadence introduced its Hosted Design Solutions in 2008, which is SAAS for the semiconductor industry and we provide a complete package of proven technology, methodology, services, and a collaboration infrastructure. Cloud computing has a lot of potential, but there are significant concerns about security that need to be overcome for it to become truly mainstream.
