EDA executives were taken to task and sparks flew at a panel meeting at the Design and Verification Conference.

Topics ranged from lawsuits to rumours of corporate demise to the old battles over System Verilog versus SystemC.

“We didn’t start [the lawsuit with Synopsys],” said Magma’s CEO Rajeev Madhavan, when asked whether he regretted the lawsuit. “We sent a letter and they responded to it with litigation.”

But Synopsys was not ready to take the blame for initiating the legal action.

“A letter that you receive inquiring if you are violating a patent is the beginning of legal proceedings,” said Antun Domic, general manager of implementation at Synopsys. “It’s not a letter just to say hello.”

Madhavan complained about how the industry is spending $50m a year on lawsuits and how that money could better be spent on hiring 500 more engineers. The cost of the lawsuit has meant net losses for Magma, in spite of record revenues.

“We are not a litigious company,” he said. Magma admitted that it was not using any of the patents in question in the lawsuit. Synopsys’s Domic would not answer the question as to whether his company was using the patents.

Jasper’s CEO was grilled on rumours that her company was in trouble, and addressed each point in turn. First, she said, it is not true that the company has recently lost 10 sales people, but the number is between 5 and 10 she said.

“With a start up change is inevitable,” said CEO Kathryn Kranen. “We’ve had a lot of sales experimentation, and our rate of sales person turnover is not unusual.”

Kranen confirmed that Craig Shirley, v-p of sales has moved on, leaving Jasper for another opportunity closer to his home in Texas.

Kranen also responded to questions about Jasper reducing the size of its engineering staff, saying that the December 2004 acquisition of Safe Logic left Jasper with a very large engineering staff. Since then the company has shifted the centre of its engineering operations, building a group in Brazil.

“We haven’t found the same level of graduates from Berkeley and Stanford with formal functional verification knowledge,” she said.

Still, in spite of shifts in its engineering group, Kranen said her company is up 40 per cent in engineering head count since the 2004 acquisition.

Cadence was put to task over its failed design and IP services offering.

“It was a big play and it didn’t work,” said Ted Vucurevich, CTO of Cadence. “The problem with the model had to do with what the industry was ready to accept. The industry wanted either commodity work or very specialised work.”

But while the design services play didn’t yield much in revenues, Vucurevich said “I would hold it up to anyone else in terms of profitability.”

EDA luminaries also argued over SystemC and other development environments in EDA, with many acknowledging that SystemC was not as accepted in the United States as in Europe and Japan.

“I prefer to think of SystemC as a late bloomer in the US,” said Brett Cline, so called “SystemC Poster Boy.”

Gartner/Dataquest EDA analyst Gary Smith noted that SystemC is being used as much in the United States as it is in Japan and Europe. That’s because of the three implementations of SystemC, only one is available commercially in the United States and it is not the implementation of choice for SystemC designers there.

“There is not a lot of algorithmic SystemC done in the US,” Smith said. “So these guys in the US are building their own SystemC tools. The EDA companies are not serving the other two areas.”

Discussing the move customer preferences away from a single vendor strategy to a best of breed point solution strategy, EDA start ups said that the big three EDA companies try to gain an edge by giving some tools away for free in the mix that they sell to customers.

“As a start up you have to stay differentiated,” said Kranen.

“Large companies don’t give things away for free,” said Synopsys’s Domic.

“Customers say ‘I don’t want that, I want the other thing for less,’”

“The free stuff comes in the mix,” said Kranen.

“Mixes are mixes,” said Domic.

“Companies do do mixes,” said Magma’s Madhavan. “We do shoot ourselves in the foot. It’s got to stop.”

Gartner/Dataquest’s Smith said that the big companies’ offerings are no longer that differentiated anymore.

“Customers are no longer in the position where they could get fired for buying one company or another,” he said, and that has put downward pricing pressure on the big three EDA vendors. “A lot of CAD budgets were not spent last year because companies got great deals.

“Power users have now gone back to best of breed point tools… They are beating up the big three but not the start ups. They rely on the start-ups for leading edge tools.”