Travelling On The Silicon Road

There has been a lot of talk recently over the blogosphere (& elsewhere!) about the changing face of EDA, EDA is doomed, EDA needs to change its biz model in order to survive etc.
What needs to be kept in perspective is the evolving value-proposition & risk sharing perceived by the chip designing company from an EDA vendor’s offering; especially in these times of the escalating costs (and diminishing success rates) of  chip designs in the higher technos.
I see the following path for the EDA vendors

• EDA vendors’ offering to be more service oriented and I do not mean tool based trouble shooting here.  

• Point tools across EDA vendors are losing their differentiation but are essential for basic design flow. I do not see chip vendors getting into developing these.  

• EDA vendors will partner for point tools. These tools will evolve as per market requirements and be available on a pay-per-use model and bolstered by cloud computing.  

• As a service, EDA vendors will closely work with the chip developers to see the project from specs to manufacturing. This is the service part of the tool+ service offering of the EDA vendors. The major chunk of the EDA vendor’s revenue will come from this service part and this will be the deciding criteria for the EDA vendors’ ranking in the chip designing world.  

Recommend a couple of interesting articles

What EDA needs to do to start growing again and Cadence goes two-dimensional

I had mentioned about technology fitting serendipitously in developing countries in an earlier post. Just came across this news item which shows yet another use of a consumer device for an unintended but highly useful application.

Pediatric eye surgeons in India and elsewhere find that the iPhone’s security and features makes it the best platform to be used in tele-opthalmology to cure Retinopathy of Prematurity (RoP). An Indian eye hospital is piloting software that will push retinal images collected from patients in remote locations to the doctors’ iPhones. They can then quickly send their diagnosis and recommendations from their iPhones to the doctors in the location nearest to the patient. Laboratory assistants take pictures of the retinas of prematurely born babies and transmit them via broadband to pediatric eye surgeons, who could be hundreds or thousands of miles away.
It is envisioning of applications like these that will help to bridge the digital divide