Industry Expert Blogs

ICCAD’09 was a fairly good vintage. It started Monday morning with an excellent keynote from Hamid Pirahesh about cloud computing. The same day in the afternoon, a more EDA-focused discussion was initiated by Jim Hogan and Paul McLellan (slides can be found here), asking the question “What EDA needs to change for 2020 success?”

Paul rightly emphasized three trends. The first one is well know: the continuously rising cost of IC designs, about $50M for today’s 45nm node. The second trend is that the fastest growing part of the design cost is software –more than half of the overall cost, Paul even claiming close to 2/3 of the overall cost. The third trend is an increasingly fragmented consumer market: the number of end products goes into the 10’s of billions, but these products are declined in many more different kinds, which means that most of them are shipping in smaller individual volumes.

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