The battle for control of electronic platforms has been joined, says Ravi Subramanian, CEO of Berkeley Design Automation (BDA), because platforms are the way to bring down the cost of electronics products sufficiently to attract the spending of the fast-growing new middle classes of Asia, particularly in Indonesia, Vietnam and Bangladesh.
"We’re in a tremendous period of innovation despite the economic uncertainty," says Subramanian, "50% of the design starts in 2011 will be on 40nm, and 80% of the revenues will be from 65nm."
Subramanian sees five components in an electronic platform: apps processor; sensors and displays; power management; memory; connectivity.
"All of them need to be cheaper," he says, adding "Panasonic want to reduce their TV BOM by 3x which requires a fundamental re-design."
Subramanian reckons that the winners in the platform wars will need to control as many of the five components as they can.
This is a force towards a return to verticalisation of the electronics industry. For instance Apple, he says, has 1,000 IC designers.
He also quotes Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer’s question: "Why am I selling my best image sensors to Apple?" as an indicator of the way big companies are approaching the age-old problem of competing with their customers.
Other ongoing examples of the customer/competitor dilemma are the Samsung-Apple IP wars over handset patents and the banning of the Galaxy Tab in Europe, and Apple's move away from Samsung to TSMC for foundry.
If the owners of electronic platforms are going to keep their core competences to themselves, rather than selling them to their competitors, then the systems industry is going to change radically.
BDA’s part in this is to bring down the cost of adding the ever-increasing element of analogue circuitry to SOCs.
"Analogue and mixed signal components are dominating the BOM," says Subramanian, "the analogue content of platforms is rapidly growing, the active device count in mixed signal circuits is soaring and analogue circuits are changing because of smaller geometries which make the noise-to-signal ratio worse."
BDA’s software attacks the worst phenomena of deep sub-micron – parasitics, device noise, mismatch between wafer layers and variability. Subramanian says BDA does a much better job than his competitors because of three differences in BDA’s algorithms compared to those of his competitors.
"We use a non-linear approach; our competitors use a linear approach," he says, "we use a Stochastic approach to look at noise; our competitors don’t; we use multi-rate techniques; our competitors use single-rate techniques."
That results in verification times 5-10x faster than the competition, says Subramanian.
Doing this well, has got BDA into Deloitte’s ‘Fast 500’ group of the fastest growing companies measured by revenue.