Commentary: EDA is dead, software lives

Paul McLellan, EE Times
(03/16/2007 1:36 PM EDT)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=198001571

EDA is dead. Yes, it's still needed: We're not going to go back to designing chips with rubilith again. But the reality is that fewer and fewer chips are being designed, and most of the differentiation of a system is moving into the software. Even Gary Smith, the longtime Gartner analyst for EDA, proclaimed at the 2006 DAC that "It's the software, stupid." And then Gartner laid off Gary's EDA group, another symptom.

Historically, semiconductor economics have been the single driver behind EDA, especially during the 1980s and 1990s. By avoiding moving to the next process node, a company faced getting trampled by competition with offerings at half the cost. This is no longer the case. The only reason to consider a 45nm design is because you need something that you can't get otherwise, primarily density of transistors since even speed and power are not clearly moving in the right direction with each process node.

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