Windows will become the de facto standard operating system for EDA applications, in the same way as the PC has superseded dedicated Unix boxes, and EDA firms currently migrating their software to Linux are running up a blind alley.

That’s the view of John Tanner, founder and CEO of Tanner EDA, whose tools run under Windows on PCs.

Tanner said the higher performance of today’s PCs versus dedicated Unix boxes is forcing EDA firms to use them, but porting existing code to Windows from Unix is a huge task. Migrating to Linux running on a PC is not so onerous.

“EDA vendors are moving wholesale to Linux as they acknowledge that the dedicated Unix hardware vendors have been bypassed,” said Tanner.

“It is a desperation move, as it would be extremely costly for them to port their tools to Windows and they must stay on the highest performance hardware,” he said.

“With Windows it is easy for us to test and support our software on the relatively few modern versions of Windows,” added Tanner.

“It is much more difficult for Linux vendors to do the same, and their rapidly evolving platform means that machine configurations are immediately obsolete,” he said.

However, Wesley Ryder, Mentor Graphics’ European technical director, said that for its applications Mentor saw higher performance on Linux than Windows, although Unix boxes are still the industry standard.

“Unix remains the mainstay of EDA, no doubt,” said Ryder. “It’s certainly not growing very fast, but neither is [Windows] NT.” In contrast Linux, which offers a “solid engineering environment”, with features such as support for multiple CPUs, is growing at ten times the rate, according to Ryder.

www.mentor.com
www.tanner.com/eda