EDA embrace software, chip designing to go cheap

By siliconindia   |   Monday, 14 September 2009, 18:41 IST
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EDA embrace software, chip designing to go cheap
Bangalore: There is a general perception in the semiconductor industry that as the industry attains new growth, the cost of chip designing will also go up. However, Walden. C. Rhines, Chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphics, a leader in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry disagrees with this belief. He believes that the integrated embedded software development environment can control this rise in costs. "The trend is towards an integrated approach. Many companies are adopting it today and delivers the same productivity to the chips," said Rhines. Another reason for this changing trend is the increasing number of embedded software developers. "In any design the ratio of software to hardware designers is greater, the trend is that software people are outnumbering the hardware people," said Rhines while speaking at the EDA Tech Forum in Bangalore. The EDA Tech Forum series, which is held in 16 cities around the world, brings together over 7,500 attendees annually from over 2,000 companies. It provides a platform for designers and engineers to network with their peers and, conversely, for EDA solution providers to reach those markets. According to Rhines, many companies that design chips are now using system architecture, embedded software and the reference designs and they basically do the whole design that their customers used to do. "There are more and more embedded softwares that doesn't have much differentiation with the chip, you have to work on the drivers, middleware, operating system and other application development," says Rhines. He also believes that there is still a bigger opportunity in the embedded software arena through the reuse of existing software and through using of open standard to migrate from software and limited design. This controls the hardware billing part to a large extent. The speakers also felt that with the changing trend, the semiconductor industry should also start focusing more on the needs of the society. "We should go beyond customers and see what the society wants from the semiconductor industry," said Neeraj Paliwal, Vice President of NXP India, a semiconductor company. Palilwal also emphasized on the fact there is an untapped market, which is available in a country like India. Palilwal took the example of the current outbreak of H1N1 flu and mentioned that it takes a long time to get the test reports, "By making use of more technology we can improve this process," Palilwal pointed out while speaking at the EDA Tech Forum. On the same occasion, Ganapathy Subramium, CEO of Cosmic Circuits, a provider of differentiated analog and mixed-signal IP cores spoke about making use of innovation to drive interpreneurship - entrepreneurship within an organization.