An argument bubbled to the surface during the DATE design software exhibition last week over whose responsibility it is to improve the state of the fractured design tool chain.
Rene Penning de Vries, chief technology officer of Philips Semiconductors, told delegates in his keynote address that he was fed up with having to integrate the hundreds of EDA tools a large integrated device manufacturer (IDM) uses and wanted the industry to sort things out.
“That’s what you [the EDA industry] place on our shoulders and we are worried it will continue,” he said. “I think you should provide a means for us to seamlessly integrate all those fantastic tools you make available. Adopting – and sticking to – standards would be great.”
In his speech, Wally Rhines, chairman and chief executive of Mentor Graphics, accepted it was the job of the industry to come up with a new wave of tools to help facilitate the exchange of information where the current paradigm is restrictive. For example, between analogue and digital designers, between hardware and software engineers, and between the chip designer and the foundry.
However, Raul Camposano, chief technology officer at Synopsys, said Philips could take its pick of tools and did not necessarily have to put itself in that costly, time-consuming position. It could choose a more highly integrated backbone flow from one provider.
And Rajeev Madhavan, chairman and CEO of Magma Design, insisted it was the industry’s responsibility not just to enable easy integration of tools, but to improve the automation of chip design. Not only could that make 65nm processes viable for products that do not ship in ultra-high volumes, but it could further the cause of the system level approach to design.
“If you can automate implementation then you can put SystemC in front of it,” said Madhavan. “Without it you’ll never get electronic system level (ESL) adoption.”