Paul Double of EDA Solutions says changing demands from designers are pushing business towards lower cost, smaller EDA specialists in the analogue and mixed-signal arena

Before the downturn, with money plentiful, technical directors often took the obvious route when looking for EDA tools for analogue and mixed-signal design – going to one of the two or three biggest names in the industry and buying their tools, often to work with digital tools from the same vendors that were already installed.

Not surprisingly, the big players went along with this very happily, promulgating the myth that a totally integrated analogue/digital design flow with tools from a single vendor is always the most cost-effective design solution.

The recession has made tool buyers take a closer look at the economics and low-cost PC-based tools for analogue and mixed-signal design have never been in greater demand. With prices starting at around 10 per cent of that of tools from the big EDA names, yet with 90 per cent of the useful functionality for many applications.

Some smaller EDA vendors have seen up to 50 per cent compound growth in sales of analogue and mixed signal simulation and layout tools in Europe in the last two years.

And such companies are not new brands in Europe – they include very established ones. Over the same period the market leaders have either seen sales decline or growth slow dramatically.

The second factor driving demand for separate analogue and mixed-signal tools is that the system-on-chip goal of many Asic designers is becoming less popular as chip geometries shrink. This is because digital designs scale relatively easily but analogue circuit elements do not.

The biggest problem lies in the way that the supply voltage has reduced together with transistor size. With voltages now moving towards 1V and below, it is becoming much more difficult to design reliable analogue circuits.

Whereas Moore’s Law scaling almost always benefits digital logic in terms of density, the techniques needed to build stable analogue circuits for ultra-low supply voltages often means that the analogue section can increase in size for a smaller-geometry process compared with a circuit designed for an older process with greater voltage headroom.

As a result, there is a tendency towards using separate digital and analogue chips for a particular design solution and so the desire for an integrated digital/analogue design flow becomes less significant. Analogue designers look for the easiest to use and most cost-effective analogue tools.

Finally, the emergence of many start-up companies aiming to develop analogue and mixed signal designs but with limited budgets is driving demand for low-cost tools that can be installed and used easily, ease-of-use and design productivity being essential in achieving short time-to-market for new devices.

Incidentally, in some of these companies, the founder is both technical director and sales director, so using PC-based tools has the added advantage of enabling work to continue while travelling, something that’s very difficult with UNIX-based design environments.

To summarise, the overall EDA market may now be recovering slowly, but it is the fast-growing market share of more specialised tool vendors, rather than ever-increasing dominance by the bigger players that characterises how the market is changing.

Paul Double is managing director of EDA Solutions, European agent for Tanner EDA’s PC-based analogue/mixed-signal tools.

www.eda-solutions.com
www.tanner.com