Rita Glover, EDA Today, L.C.
September 2001

The desert gambling haven of Las Vegas, Nevada was the setting for the 38^th Design Automation Conference, better known as "DAC."  Held each year in June at a different major city in the U.S., DAC is the premier trade show and technical conference of the electronic design automation (EDA) industry.  DAC is the place where industry insiders come together to examine the most complex design issues in the form of panels, speeches, and technical papers, and find out about the latest EDA solutions for addressing them.

One of the major themes at this year's event was the optimization of product design tools and processes for use across the supply chain.  "Historically, the industry has been focused on improved performance of individual point tools, and that alone will not solve today's generation of design challenges," said Ray Bingham, CEO of the top EDA company, Cadence Design Systems.  "Our customers need integrated solutions, and they need to ensure that those solutions facilitate collaboration across the design chain.  No single company can solve the entire spectrum of design challenges the industry faces.  Cooperation within the electronic design industry and across other industries such as manufacturing and software design are critically important."

Convergence of Design Domains

Today the various electronic design domains are considered to be separate worlds.  This creates major bottlenecks in the design process that limit time-to-market, functionality, and the ability to meet price/performance goals.  The EDA industry is realizing that it needs to move quickly toward the convergence of certain electronic design domains in particular:

The Electronics Supply Chain

This year DAC featured a major panel on the Electronics Supply Chain, which was atypical for a conference that has usually focused on the design of components.  But a shift is occurring from vertical integration, where one integrated device manufacturer "does it all," to the notion of disaggregation, which implies a global network of outsourcing with numerous suppliers.  This new trend is requiring that the EDA industry expand its borders and extend outward into what some are calling the "design chain."

Regardless of the term that is used, the environment in which electronic designers are working is being radically transformed by the need to play in an electronics supply chain.  This panel, which was comprised of representatives from all the players along the chain, discussed the fact that design collaboration involves the entire supply chain, as shown in Figure 1.  Design collaboration environments are absolutely required to rationalize the business processes and manufacturability issues, and enhance time-to-money and the overall profitability of the corporation.

Figure 1.  Design collaboration involves the entire supply chain.

Collaborative design environments are now available with extremely reliable security in place to enable the secure sharing of information between systems houses and their suppliers, outside design contractors, chip, package and board foundries, and system manufacturing suppliers.  These bodies of data include such things as bills of materials, parts procurement databases including obsolescence information, and chip data that is sensible to the design and manufacturing tools.  Quite a few vendors announced new products to address these issues.

With major companies in the telecommunications and networking industries announcing layoffs of tens of thousands of people, a collaborative design environment is not just another expendable luxury.  On the contrary, representatives of several of these companies said that in a time of cutbacks, they now must outsource more of the design processes.  They will be looking to the public trading exchanges to provide these design collaboration environments for their daily use, because it is too expensive to develop their own proprietary environments themselves.

For obvious reasons, interoperability of design tools is becoming more important than ever.  Cadence, for example, announced Genesis, an open application programming interface (API) for IC design data.  The move was met with some skepticism, however, because source code was not being released at the time of the announcement.  It still remains to be seen whether EDA vendors can put aside competitive issues and open up their databases to permit the kind of interoperability that the supply chain demands.

Formal verification

A discussion of DAC 2001 would not be complete without taking note of the rapidly increasing activity that is going on in the area of formal verification.  This technology employs mathematical proof engines to validate the equivalence of two representations of a circuit, or to check for conditions that may or may not occur.  At this time, formal verification is one of the most little-used methods of verification, but it may eventually turn out to be the most cost-effective compared to capital-intensive methods such as emulation, or time-intensive methods such as simulation.

A number of new formal verification companies announced at DAC 2001 -- Averant, @HDL, Prover Technology, Real Intent, Valiosys, and Veritable -- joining other established vendors such as Avant!, Cadence, Synopsys, and 0-In.  Others are waiting in the wings.  We believe this will become a hot area, because the capabilities of formal verification are not limited to hardware designs.  This technology could be a silver bullet in solving the verification problems of large designs if some vendor figures out how to validate software along with hardware.  It's probably not far away.

Demographics

DAC draws designers of all types, but the biggest demographic concentration this year was in the areas of ASIC and digital logic design, as shown in Figure 2.  The attendance in 2001 totaled over 14,000, and of these, about 6,000 were working engineers and 26 percent were international attendees (non-U.S.).

Figure 2.  Types of design being done by DAC attendees (total is greater than 100 percent because a designer may be working in multiple areas).

The attendance was down from around 7,700 last year, apparently due to travel cutbacks associated with the semiconductor downturn.  But many vendors at the exhibition noticed that the lower numbers were more than made up for by the experience level and decision-making authority of the designers who were in attendance.  The cutbacks seemed only to fortify the overall quality of the event.

Online Access to DAC Sessions

Many of the DAC panels and talks can be accessed for remote viewing via the Internet at www.dac.com.  We especially recommend the keynote speech by Dr. Henry Samueli of Broadcom who spoke on "Designing in the New Millenium:  It's Even Harder Than We Thought."  There are also excellent offerings on the design of embedded systems and programmable logic.

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