EDA-I: what is EDA?

I work in the EDA industry. It's a very small and niche sector. The total EDA revenue is about US$ 4 billion. There are four major players here: Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor Graphics and Magma. Besides these, there are many small companies specializing in some nicher area of EDA. Examples of some these smaller companies are: Atrenta (focussing on early design closure), SequenceDesign (focussing on low power and Parasitic Extraction), Calypto, Denali, NuSym, Synfora etc. Here is one long list of EDA companies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_EDA_companies

Many of my friends work in the IT industry. But most of them are ignorant of EDA. Almost every one of them has different notion on what I do. Some of them think that I'm into DSP. Some other guy thinks that I work in the hardware design. Someone thinks that I work in the embedded software domain. Then I've another friend who thinks that I'm into firmware development.

I have another category of friends who are aware of EDA; but they just don't know what we do in EDA. They think I write Verilog or VHDL code. They ask me: what is the input to my tool and what is its output.

Then someone came to know that I work in VLSI Test in EDA. Since Testing in the software industry is called QA (Quality Assurance), some of my friends believe that I do some kind of QA work!

I plan to write a series of articles here on what we do in EDA industry. I'll write it in a very simple language.

First of all, EDA stands for Electronic Design Automation. We're VLSI CAD guys. Many people know about AutoCAD : the CAD tool for mechanical design. EDA plays a similar role for semiconductor design & manufacturing.

If you're a civil engineer designing and constructing bridges, you don't start building the bridge right away when you get the assignment. You first design it in a software, simulate it, analyze various engineering aspects of it. You deal with a model of the bridge during the design phase. A model might be a software model, a mathematical model (truss etc), or just a design that you drew with a pencil. Once you finalize the design, then the construction of the bridge starts. Same is the case with a mechanical engineer working in an automobile industry. When a new car is to be launched, the automobile company just doesn't start manufacturing the car. The design engineer will first model the car in a software and take it through all the phases of the design.

EDA plays the similar role for electronic design. EDA industry creates CAD tools for electronic design engineers (both chip and board). They take a chip from design to manufacturing using various EDA tools.

There are two large forums for EDA folks:

1. CEDA (IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation)
2. SIGDA (ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation)
   

I think the biggest conference (and broadest - covering all aspects of EDA) in EDA industry is DAC (Design Automation Conference). DAC might possibly be the oldest conference also in EDA industry. Its 46th conference will be held in July 2009. (DAC is 46 year old whereas EDA as an industry is probably in its twenties now!)

Is there any person who can be called as father of EDA? IMHO, Prof Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli of EECS department of Berkley definitely fits into that role. He was a co-founder of Synopsys and Cadence, the two leading companies in the area of EDA. He was a Director of ViewLogic and Chair of the Technical Advisory Board of Synopsys. He is the Chief Technology Advisor of Cadence Design System. His paper Tides of EDA explains the evolution of the EDA industry.

There is a power-point presentation on EDA titled EDA-story-so-far that also explains the EDA industry nicely.

In my next post, I'll describe how we can categorize different EDA tools (Implementation, Verification, Frontend, Backend, ASIC/FPGA/SoC, PCB/SiP, IP, Design Services etc. Strictly speaking, IPs are not tools, but small designs. More about that in my next post.)