BANGALORE, INDIA: Globally, India is amongst the fastest growing markets for EDA tools, along with USA and China. With the EDA market growing here at about 30 percent annually, Hewlett Packard, a leading EDA high performance computing platform solutions provider, is targeting the fast growing chip design centers in India.

On this occasion of the HP Intel Asia-Pacific EDA seminar, Brain Lowe, Alliance Marketing Manager of HP (Cupertino) with Faisal M. Paul, Country Manager (India) – HPC & OSLO of HP (India), spoke to Manu Sharma of CIOL Bureau the on various aspects of the EDA industry. Excerpts:

CIOL: What is EDA and what is its importance?

Brian Lowe: Electronic Design Automation (EDA) is the category of tools for designing and producing electronic systems ranging from printed circuit boards (PCBs) to integrated circuits (ICs). This is sometimes referred to as ECAD (electronic computer-aided design) or just CAD.

EDA is specifically for electronics, and concentrates on EDA used for designing integrated circuits. As chips grow larger and become more complex to design EDA becomes much more important at semiconductor companies.

CIOL: What are the trends in EDA?

BL: EDA computing complexity and very complex chip designs put heavy demands on computing resources such as CPU MIPS and memory. In addition, there is a need for reliable, scalable storage because of the huge chip design database.

There is also a need for setting up data centers and global grid that allow designers to tap into compute servers worldwide. This will allow the compute infrastructure to utilized very efficiently. Besides, this allows the designers and the company to scale the compute resources during various phases of a project.

There is also need to optimize data center design such as power, cooling, floor space, etc., and HP's HPC clustering technologies and blades fit the bill.

CIOL: What is HP's role in the EDA industry?

BL: Electronic product development organizations are constantly challenged to deliver advanced technology to market in less time. HP's focuses on inventiveness creates innovative high-performance technical computing solutions that allow design teams to maximize their EDA productivity.

HP has architected their technical computing solutions to make large memory capacity affordable. This allows engineers to synthesize and simulate larger sections of their designs, thereby maximizing designer productivity.