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.
The electronic design automation (EDA) industry is experiencing strong financial growth and is making a vital contribution to the success of much larger semiconductor and electronic systems industries.
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:
