Entrepreneur
Mountain View, CA, USA

 

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The End of EDA - Toward System Design

Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and semiconductors developed in parallel since the 1960’s to create a formidable industry that truly changed the world. “Chips” today epitomize semiconductors, with close to 10 billion transistors on a silicon die of about 500 mm2. The semiconductor industry has surpassed US$300 Billion and enables an electronic systems industry estimated to be over US$2 Trillion. Digital chips provide, in a commoditized manner, processing power, memory and communication – in short “intelligence”. EDA has become a US$7 Billion industry; it encompasses mainly design tools (software to design electronics), in some cases special hardware (e.g. emulators and simulation accelerators), and “Intellectual Property” (IP - predesigned blocks such as memories, processors and input/output blocks). EDA serves mainly chip design, in particular digital chip design. EDA is symbiotic with chip design: Chip design is not possible without EDA, and the design process determines and is determined by EDA.

Consider the bill of materials (BoM) of perhaps the most iconic electronic product of the last decade, the smartphone: A 16GB iPhone 5s, which retails for US$649 in the US, contains only US$83 in chips, out of a total BoM of US$199 [source: IHS Inc.]. Most of the material cost is already in the system, meaning battery, electro/mechanical, screen, camera, manufacturing cost, etc. The cost of the software is also increasing rapidly and is probably already higher than the chips: Apple sold over $10B in the app store alone last year, which for 255M devices sold the same year results in $39 per device. This does not include software given away such as the operating system, nor software purchased through other channels. Moving forward, the cost of the chips in a system will continue to decrease, driven by standardization, volume and migration of functionality into software. The BoM will be increasingly dominated by the system cost (other than chips), and system design and software will be the dominant factors for market success.

The triumph of chips and EDA, of electronics as the source of intelligence in systems, is about to be subsumed by a much larger success story. What we may be witnessing is not just the commoditization of electronics, or the passing of a particular period of electronic design enabled by EDA, but the end of electronic design / EDA as such: that is, the end point of a technological evolution and the universalization of the use of chips as the final form of intelligence in everything ^[1].

This presentation will elaborate on these concepts and present some advanced ideas in system design, focused on fast design times (machine learning for pre-computed design reuse) and high-speed design (interactive electromagnetic simulation and optimizations for PCB).

 

[1] Paraphrasing Francis Fukuyama’s essay "The End of History?" The National Interest, 1989

 

About the speaker:

Raul Camposano was CEO at Nimbic Inc. Mentor Graphics Corp. has acquired Nimbic in May 2014. Dr. Camposano has over 25 years of experience in electronics and design technology with careers in industry and academia. Until 2009 he was President and CEO of Xoomsys, a startup in design technology. From 1994 to 2007 he was with Synopsys, where he served as Chief Technology Officer, Senior Vice President, and General Manager for multiple Business Units. Prior to joining Synopsys, Dr. Camposano was a professor of Computer Science at GMD in Germany and a staff member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Raul holds a B.S. and M.S. in EE from the University of Chile, and a Ph.D. in CS from the University of Karlsruhe. He has published over 70 technical papers and three books. Dr. Camposano serves on numerous editorial, advisory and company boards and was an Advisory Professor at Fudan University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 1999.