The Dawn of a Decade

In a few of days, as we’ll celebrate the New Year, we will also be closing the chapter of a decade. 10 years have already passed by since the fireworks of the new millennium. And looking back, it is amazing to realize how much things have changed, including and especially, in our industry.

Can you remember the work environment from ten years ago? Laptops were Compaq or IBM Thinkpads; today, if they’re not from Dell, they might still have a Thinkpad logo, but under the Chinese Lenovo brand. If you were using EDA tools, you were most likely running them on a Sun Solaris platform; today it is on a turbo-charged PC with an enterprise version of Linux. Your boss was showing off with its Palm Pilot organizer; today your pocket hosts a device named after a fruit or a berry – which seems to indicate that, these days, botanical knowledge is as important as technological expertise to succeed in the mobile market.

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During the course of the past decade, the electronic design industry has profoundly changed, and the above mentioned examples are only a few of the many consequences. Our industry is torn by opposite trends: the commoditization of electronics on one side and skyrocketing costs of IC design on the other. At the end of the 90’s, companies like Sun Microsystems and Nokia were iconic customers of the EDA industry, always at the forefront of hardware development and driving new design and verification methodologies. Sun is now part of Oracle – an acquisition mostly triggered by Sun’s software legacy – and Nokia stopped all its IC design activity at the same time it acquired Navteq – the map provider – for more than $8 billion.

Specialization and consolidation have been the main driving forces reshaping the industry. In the IC manufacturing landscape, platforms are now “common” and foundries are “global”. Yesterday’s IDMs trying to reinvent their business are going fablite, while fabless companies thrive, such as Qualcomm now well established in the top 10 chip supplier ranking.

Today, few are the companies which will fully create ICs in-house, from concept to physical implementation. RTL is becoming a very natural hand-off point between a fabless and its silicon vendor. At the dawn of a new decade and in a changing context, the most successful companies are differentiating on algorithms, architecture and their ability to meet project deadlines. These companies are also the ones taking full advantage of ESL and HLS tools to impact their design cycles.

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