Industry Expert Blogs

One of the overwhelming issues facing the EDA community is the need and desire to increase total sales. One of the greatest hurdles in the ongoing chase to get more seats is the inability to convert the design software budget dollars into new seat licenses. Although most large companies have more than adequate dollars budgeted for software, less than a quarter of the dollars represent new tool acquisitions. The balance of the funds are for maintenance, training, and management functions like parceling out the limited number of seats available.

The inherent value of EDA tools is to provide more automation to the design task, thereby increasing the individual engineer’s productivity. As an example of the value of a tool, design for test tools reduce the time for test development and are able to improve fault coverage over manual methods in the test to over 90 percent of all faults. The tool leads to better test coverage of the design resulting in a higher probability of catching the rare or random errors that make the system fail. So the tools simultaneously reduce engineering time and improve test quality by enhancing internal node observability and controllability. As an added benefit, the window to the internal nodes makes the system debug and integration much easier, due to the availability of the internal state data at the time of failure. So here an additional tool not only improves the risk-performance equation in its intended department, but also aids another group in performing the debugging work.

Click here to read more ...