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Follow UsBANGALORE, INDIA: With India growing mightier in semiconductor, the EDA companies in India are witnessing a rising consumption than ever before.
In an exclusive interview with CIOL, Charlie Huang, senior vice president, worldwide field operations, Cadence Design Systems, touches upon how the industry has been performing and how the company is addressing the design challenges
Excerpts
1. How is the EDA industry doing today globally? How has 2010 and the current year been for the EDA industry? What will fuel its growth?
The fortunes of the EDA industry are closely linked with that of the semiconductor and the consumer/industrial electronics industries. Thanks to the tremendous demand for electronics across verticals, the semiconductor industry has seen a steady growth. In fact, the recently-concluded Singapore Semiconductor Industry Association pegged the global semiconductor sales as reaching $313 billion in 2012.
The year 2010 saw a robust growth of above 32 per cent from the previous year driven along by the demands from the electronic ecosystem. This year, the revival from the global recession drove semiconductor companies to be cautious and analyze purchase decisions. To save costs, the focus shifted to tapping the core strengths and the existing product lines. As a result, growth was pretty much flat throughout the year, give or take a percentage from 2010.
Key application areas that will continue to fuel the growth of the semiconductor industry are the three C’s - Consumer, Computing and Communications. Apart from the above, developments in the medical electronics field, energy/smart grid/solar sector, rising use of electronics systems in the automotive industry are also contributing to the growth of the semiconductor industry.
2. What is the way forward for the EDA industry?
The semiconductor and system design industry is undergoing a disruptive transformation so profound that even the best-known and well-prepared companies will be affected. This transformation is not about new electronic design automation (EDA) tools. It’s not about new methodologies. It’s not about the functional verification crisis or the move to electronic system-level design. It is about something much larger.
The EDA industry now stands at a crossroads where it must change to continue as a successful business. The change begins with a shift from traditional innovation to integration in the electronic systems industry, and it results in a new focus on profitability.
Change begins with EDA360, a new vision for what the EDA industry can become.
3.How has the industry performed in India during 2010? What were the drivers for EDA in India this year?
2009 was a challenging year for the entire global economy, and the electronics, semiconductor and EDA (Electronic Design Automation) industries were also affected. Semiconductor companies were cautious and by delaying their purchase decisions, impacted the overall electronics industry. To save costs, they focused on core strengths, and consolidated and realigned resources to complement existing product lines.
But in 2010, the Indian semiconductor design market gained strategic importance, and consequently helped the industry move up the value chain. According to the ISA-Frost & Sullivan India Semiconductor Market Update report, the India market grew a phenomenal 28.3 per cent over the 2009 with mobile devices, telecommunications, IT/OA contributing most of the revenue.
In terms of the sectors that will drive the growth of the semiconductor industry, consumer, computing and communications will continue to dominate. Healthcare, smart grid, 4G phones and automotive are emerging sectors that will make increased use of semiconductors solutions. A number of semiconductor companies have already invested in or are considering investment in alternative technologies, such as green technologies like solar panels.
India has great potential as a semiconductor market due to huge domestic market for electronics equipment. While the urban demand for electronic gadgets is a huge opportunity in itself, there is also an untapped and vast opportunity for locally made products for the local market, especially in the area of telecom and wireless applications.
4. What is the current status of the EDA industry in India?
EDA is at the core of electronics devices - as the demand for electronics and related semiconductors increases, so will the demand for EDA. According to a Gartner report in July 2011, the Indian semiconductor consumption is projected to grow to total $8.2 billion in 2011, a 15.5 percent increase from 2010 consumption of $7.1 billion.
The changing demographics, increasing spending behavior of the consumers, favourable economic development and government policies are the main drivers for the growth of the electronic manufacturing industry in India. With major semiconductor MNCs expanding their footprints and electronic equipment manufacturing companies setting up production facilities in India, there is more demand for EDA services in India. In addition, Indian design services companies as well as IP and product start-ups are also growing and that presents a growth opportunity for EDA.
The main trends in the past year were:
- Application driven design
With applications becoming important in end consumer products ranging from phones to cars, the world is fast becoming application driven. Electronics companies are facing competition from new entrants who have caught up on this trend and are focusing their innovation and differentiation on apps. Companies are now expecting application-ready platforms with software and hardware from the semiconductor players. This approach will also help close the profitability gap by enabling integration-optimized intellectual property (IP) creation and selection, to assemble system-on-chips (SoCs) and systems, and system cost optimization.
- Productivity, Predictability, Profitability (3Ps)
Another trend that we saw in the industry was the 3Ps which are of critical importance to our customers. The complexities in achieving 3Ps are numerous: time-to-market windows are shorter than ever; intricacy of chip design is increasing due to convergence; competition is fierce; and there is pressure to keep the chip costs down. Companies need to churn out designs faster in the market to avoid being left behind, which in turn will increase the profitability. With the shift to applications-driven design paradigm for semiconductor companies, 3Ps will become even more imperative for them to be successful.
- Telecom and consumer electronics boom
The rapid penetration of mobile telephony and internet has played an influential role in the growth of the Indian semiconductor industry. The explosion in the demand for 3G consumer technology has resulted in an accelerated growth of the industry. In the coming two years, the growth is expected to be fuelled by the increased consumption of electronic gadgets such as wireless handsets, tablets, gaming devices, 3G networks, WiMax, netbooks, set-top-boxes and smart cards.
5.Provide a short brief on your tie-up with IMEC?
Recently, Cadence entered into an agreement with IMEC, a world-leading independent research center in nanoelectronics and nanotechnology, in conjunction with the IMEC Europractice IC Service, to introduce a first of its kind program in India wherein academia and students are offered a structured foundry access program. Never have Indian institutes, even the IITs, had direct foundry access.
This initiative takes the Cadence University Program to the next level by giving students access to actual silicon samples. Students gain access to work with state-of-the-art process and design techniques through to silicon tape-out that will better prepare them to handle the tape out pressures of the fast-paced semiconductor industry. The partnership also provides strategic value to universities and puts them on equal footing with their foreign counterparts.
As part of the agreement, Cadence will offer support to its University Software Program members by providing flows and methodologies as well as tape-out support. IMEC will provide access to IC technologies down to 65nm, SPICE models, design rules, PDKs, and standard cell libraries. The shuttle program will allow University Software Program members to tape-out all technologies offered through Europractice. This will give universities foundry access for silicon verification which has been a hurdle due to lack of strong academia-foundry partnerships.
Currently, a number of institutes such as The Indian Institute of Technology-Indore, Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad, NIST Berhampur, among others have expressed interest in the program.
6. Can you brief on EDA 360 and how it is going to help electronic eco-system players?
EDA360 is an all-encompassing vision for EDA. Hardware/software co-design is important, but it is just one specific part in the overall design cycle. EDA360 represents System Realization, the development of a complete hardware/software platform ready for applications development; SoC Realization, the creation of a single SoC including hardware-dependent software; and Silicon Realization, which includes complex digital, analog, and mixed-signal designs.
Since embedded software can comprise half the cost of SoC development, EDA360 also supports hardware/software integration and verification. This takes the scope of EDA360 far beyond the boundaries initially envisioned.
Traditional EDA focuses solely on engineering teams, while EDA360 provides capabilities for project and business management as well. It has the potential to reach across the customers’ global organization - engineers, project managers, corporate leaders — while also ensuring profitability and competitiveness in challenging business environments.
This is a new vision for the semiconductor industry, outlining an application-driven approach to system design and development. EDA360 provides an expanded, 360-degree vision of a revitalized EDA industry that serves integrators as well as creators. EDA360 will close the profitability gap through integration-ready IP creation, integration, and optimization.
Given that embedded software can take up half the cost of SoC development, EDA360 also supports hardware/software integration and verification. While traditional EDA focuses on engineering teams only, EDA360 will provide capabilities for project and business management. Without this change, EDA will struggle to solve the increasingly complex problems customers are facing now and in the future.
7.EDA market fetched double digit growth last year. Can you comment on Cadence’s growth?
Cadence is fortunate to serve industries and markets that have had, by and large, healthy growth last year even in the face of economic uncertainty around the world. But our growth is the result of more than just customers' success in the marketplace. For some time now, Cadence has invested to develop products that deliver on our EDA360 vision, and that effort is producing demonstrable success with our customers and strong operating results, as we announced in our last earnings call.
Our growth has outpaced the EDA Consortium’s industry average. We have collaborated with a number of key ecosystem partners, as evidenced by several recent major announcements. For example, last month we announced that we were the first to tapeout a Cortex-A15 at 20 nm with partners TSMC and ARM, which shows the strength of our technology, the power of our strategy, and the growing appreciation of both in the ecosystem.
8.Can you talk about your new initiatives in designing for 28 nm?
Our overall objective is to deliver technology-leading products for design, verification, and implementation of silicon, chip packages, and printed circuit boards.
By weaving these technologies together, Cadence increases the productivity of design flows — the sequence of steps required to complete a chip design process from concept to production -- for high-end, low-power, mixed-signal, and gigascale/gigahertz designs.
The move to advanced process nodes has driven innovation across virtually all of the Cadence product lines. Here is a sampling of some focus areas where our efforts help customers get the most out of their silicon, SoCs, and systems at 28nm and below.
At 28nm we have also focused on System in Package (SiP) design. With the breadth of the Cadence technology portfolio, we are the only EDA supplier that provides true silicon/package co-design capabilities, not only for traditional, horizontal multi-chip modules, but also for the most advanced 2.5D and 3D-IC stacked die devices that are increasingly being used in mobile products like smartphones and tablets. The stacked die approach is particularly attractive for customers at 28nm and below because stacked dies provide significant bandwidth advantages, as well as unmatched power efficiency and a smaller form factor — all critical factors in designs for mobile devices.
A third important area where we have made significant investments is in state-of-the-art implementation technologies, tools, and flows for customers targeting the ultimate in power, performance, and area with ARM cores. We had to rethink and rearchitect the concepts of clock-tree design and implementation that have been used for 20 years into something completely different called “clock-concurrent optimization.” This advance has enabled customers facing trade-offs between power, performance, and area for advanced ARM cores.