Industry Expert Blogs

Analyst Gary Smith looks at the EDA industry and sees a lot of promise-and a lot of change. At his annual Design Automation Conference (DAC 2014) industry briefing June 1, Smith talked about how the movement towards system design is changing not only EDA tools but also semiconductor IP and business models.

"Welcome to the wonderful world of system design, because that's what we really started to walk into this year," said Smith, chief analyst at Gary Smith EDA. Today's "OEM" is not necessarily a manufacturer, he noted. We are now seeing vertically integrated companies - such as Apple - that design nearly everything but outsource manufacturing. The key to success for these companies is developing a stable ecosystem, as ARM has done.

"System design is really different," Smith said. "If you think you can approach it like you approached the markets before, you are probably not going to be successful. You need new skills, new marketing, and a new organization."

In a colorful aside, Smith showed a diagram from 1996 and noted that "I have been talking about system design for a long time and people have not been paying a hell of a lot of attention. I've always been right - it's just that I missed by a few years. Or decades."

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