Niels Faché from Keysight Technologies shares his insights on the key EDA trends impacting the pace of innovation, as more systems companies move to design their own chips and electronic products.
Trend 1: Domain-Specific Design
Electronic product design is moving toward domain-specific orientation. What impact does domain-specific design have on EDA tool developers and users?
Niels Faché:
It is not enough anymore for product developers to just consider the traditional specifications for a chip or board.
Editor’s Comments
Semiconductor chips are the brains of the modern digital era, powering the electronic devices that we use and the digital processes that run our lives.
The production of chips has gained strategic importance to nations because much of our lives are driven by chip-dependent devices, from automobiles and smartphones to the computers and servers in data centers.
It is therefore important to be cognisant of the trends shaping the future of EDA.
They must also now consider the context in which their products will be integrated and used.
Drivers of design for context in product development teams include increased system complexity, more demanding performance and cost requirement tradeoffs, and shorter development lifecycles.
To address these issues, EDA vendors and users are seeing closer collaboration in the ecosystem from developers of components (such as an RFIC), to a sub-system (such as a radar), and a system (such as an autonomous drive system) to address integration challenges and optimise performance.
Design-for-context raises several challenges and opportunities for EDA tool providers such as:
- Creation of collaborative workflows, including better process, data, and intellectual property (IP) management across design and test phases, that allow many specialists to work together efficiently and effectively.
- Utilisation of model-based system engineering (MBSE) with system level, hierarchical design and varying levels of model fidelity depending on the type of simulation (circuit, system, or network).
- Improvement of models, including measurement-based models, that increases the accuracy of simulations. Accurate simulations earlier in the design process enable development teams to reduce validation and verification risks and the need for iterative and costly physical prototyping.
- Increasing the number of simulations through high performance compute (HPC) and parallelisation in the Cloud.
- Providing a formalised validation framework in simulation environments to sign-off on component compatibility in the required design context.
Design for context requires closer partnerships between EDA companies with greater interoperability between EDA, computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided engineering (CAE), and test tools.
It also calls for better integration of EDA tools with product lifecycle management (PLM) systems and greater investment in simulation and test process and data management to raise productivity.
Trend 2: Ubiquity of Chip Usage
Chip usage in all types of products is becoming ubiquitous and the semiconductor industry is now serving an increasing number of customer segments. How is this affecting the EDA industry?
Niels Faché:
Chip demand currently outstrips supply, and this situation clearly has worsened during the pandemic.
On a recent trip to Europe, Keysight’s chip design and manufacturing customers confirmed that demand is 30 percent higher than supply.
Some chip fabs are fully booked for the next 2 years.
However, companies are adding foundry capacity over the next 18 to 24 months that will likely result in a re-balancing of supply and demand.
The semiconductor industry is cyclical and there have always been demand cycles in chip manufacturing that have a downstream effect on the EDA vendor community. For example, automotive has been a cyclical industry for a long time.
Other applications such as consumer and healthcare have occupied fab capacity during automotive down cycles.
The diversity of applications and industry segments is helping to keep fab utilisation high.
Secular growth is strong and the “electrification of everything” is massively increasing the need for new chip sets.
Simple 8- or 16-bit microcontrollers are no longer sufficient for many applications that need more advanced computational processing and connectivity.
Start-ups continue to sprout up at a rapid pace creating new design starts and innovative products.
The fabless model allows the industry to handle a growing spectrum of applications while making efficient use of semiconductor manufacturing capacity.
There will be a continued need for EDA products to meet new design functionality and validation efforts.
Design teams need better tools, IP blocks, and consulting services from EDA companies.
Expanded use of chips in customer markets is a very positive development for EDA vendors whose growth and success rides in part on design starts and wins.
More designs started means more demand for engineers and the EDA tools they use to get their jobs done faster with intelligent automation and higher productivity.
Trend 3: EDA for Greater Reliability
Customers are demanding that chips and electronic systems last longer and function correctly throughout their lifetimes. This is particularly important in safety-critical markets like automotive and mission-critical markets like data centers. How do EDA tools address product aging, quality, and reliability concerns?
Niels Faché:
Design for reliability is nothing new for Keysight because the company’s instrument products have very stringent lifetime requirements.
Reliability becomes a net positive only if fully embraced throughout design, manufacturing, and test processes.
About Niels Faché
Niels Faché is currently the Vice President and General Manager of PathWave Software Solutions at Keysight Technologies.
Niels is responsible for Keysight’s design and simulation portfolio.
In his most recent positions, he was Vice President and General Manager of the Remarketing Solutions Division and the Keysight Services Portfolio Organisation, both part of Keysight’s Global Services Organisation.
Niels joined Hewlett Packard in 1994, when HP acquired Alphabit, a start-up software company in Belgium.
He was co-founder and CEO of Alphabit, which developed the electromagnetic simulator Momentum – now part of the PathWave Advanced Design System.
During his career, Niels has since held a variety of R&D, marketing, product planning and general management positions at HP, Agilent and Keysight in Electronic Design Automation, Test and Measurement Product Lines and Services.
His roles have often involved leveraging technology and talented teams to transform and grow organisations into front-runners.
He is based in Santa Clara, CA.
Niels holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in electrical engineering, both from the University of Ghent, Belgium, where he also served as a part-time professor from 1995 to 1997.
He has a business degree from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, and has completed coursework at the Stanford Center for Professional Development.
Keysight incorporates reliability best practices into its instrument product life cycles that have positively influenced its design and simulation tools over many years of development.
Keysight’s own internal tool users and commercial customers are increasingly interested in making sure circuits stay within electrical and thermal limits.
This seems simple, but can be quite challenging, especially when considering environment and process variation.
Chips are Increasingly part of a much larger system interconnected through different packaging technologies.
Modeling these interconnect and packaging details is what makes designing for reliability so difficult.
For example, space applications require built-in redundancies and special design patterns to increase radiation hardness.
This approach is also used in other mission critical applications such as healthcare.
Reliability and aging (wear out) requirements are gaining importance in IOT, automotive, and consumer products where once aerospace and defense was the leading driver.
As the cost of mistakes go up in these new applications, the importance of simulation on design quality increases.
Keysight’s design tools enable simulation and analysis of signal and power integrity and electromagnetic effects, which directly affect quality and reliability.
The impact for EDA tools could become even more significant if design customers push for simulation-as-signoff from the industry.
This requires validation of software through independent test suites or test bodies. EDA tools and IP are also helping to predict and avoid field failures.
Real-time data collection and analysis using embedded sensors and AI/ML software techniques promises to address silicon product reliability and aging soon.
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