harry … the ASIC guy

Rumors are flying concerning some big changes next week in EDA amongst the big players. It first got started by John Blyler on Twitter. Then Magma stock took off this week for no apparent reason. And rumors of a Cadence-Magma merger have been flying around for about a month since Rajeev denied them.

Something may happen or nothing may happen. But it’s always fun to speculate. So, what do you think would be the best merger of the top 4 EDA companies?

Vote here or feel free to leave your comments below. We’ll see who, if anyone, is right

harry the ASIC guy

I recall taking a course called The Counselor Salesperson when I was an AE at Synopsys. The course was very popular across the industry and was the basis for the book Win-Win Selling. It advocated a consultative approach to sales, one in which the salesperson tries to understand the customer’s problem first and provide a solution that he needs second. Sounds obvious, but how often do you encounter a salesperson who knows he has what you need and then tries to convince you that you have a problem?

One of the techniques in the process is called the “Magic Wand” wherein the salesperson asks the customer “What would it be like if …”. This open-ended type of question is designed to free the customer’s mind to imagine solutions that he’d otherwise not consider due to real or imagined constraints. That’s the type of question I asked last week when I asked: What would you do with 1000 CPU’s? And boy did it free your minds!

Before I go into the responses, you may be wondering what was my point in asking the question in the first place.  Well, not so surprisingly, I’m looking to understand better the possible applications of cloud computing to EDA and ASIC design. If a designer, design team, or company can affordably access a large number of CPUs for a short period of time, as needed, what would that mean? What would they be able to do with this magic wand that they would not even have thought of otherwise?

I received 8 separate responses, some of them dripping with humor, sarcasm, and even disdain. Good stuff! I’ve looked them over and noticed that they seem to fall into 4 groups, each of which highlights a different aspect or issue of this question.

“Rent Them Out”

Gabe Moretti had the best response along these lines, “(I’d) heat my house and pool while selling time to shivering engineers”. Jeremy Ralph of PDTi put some dollar value on the proposition, calculating that he could make $8.25M per month sub-licensing the licenses and CPUs. While Guarav Jalan pointed out that I’d need to also provide bandwidth to support this “pay-as-you-use” batch farm.

The opportunity is to aggregate users together to share hardware and software resources. If I buy a large quantity of hardware and software on a long-term basis at discounted rates, then I can rent it out on a shorter-term basis at higher rates and make money. The EDA company wins because they get a big sale at a low cost-of-sales. The customers win because they get access to tools on a pay-as-you-go basis at lower cost without a long-term commitment. And I win because I get to pocket the difference for taking the risk.

“Philanthropy”

One of the reasons that Karen Bartleson and I get along so well is that we’ve both been around the EDA industry for some time (we’ll leave it at that). As a result, we not only feel connected to the industry, but also some sense of responsibility to give back. Karen would train university student’s on designing SOCs. I’d train displaced workers on tools that can help them find a new job.

Even though this is not really a business model, I think it is still something that the EDA vendors should consider. Mentor is already very active in promoting it’s Displaced Worker Program. Autodesk and SolidWorks are giving away free licenses to the unemployed. This type of program should be universal. Using cloud computing resources is an easy way to make it happen without investing in lots of hardware.

(On a side note: PLEASE, PLEASE encourage anyone you know at Synopsys and Cadence to follow Mentor’s lead. Synopsys did this in 2001 and Cadence once had a “Retool-To-Work” program that was similar. I truly believe that both companies have that same sense of corporate responsibility as Mentor has, but for some reason they have not felt the urgency of the current situation. I am personally going to issue a daily challenge on Twitter to Synopsys and Cadence to follow suit until it happens. Please Retweet.)

“Do Nothing”

John Eaton pointed out that it is very difficult to use any additional capability offered as “pumpkinware” if you know it will evaporate within a month. It would take that long to set up a way to use it. And John McGehee stated that his client already has all the “beer, wine, and sangria” they can drink (New Yorkers - do you remember Beefsteak Charlie’s?), so he’d pass. John: Can you hook me up with your client ?

Seriously,  it certainly requires some planning to to take advantage of this type of horsepower. You don’t just fire off more simulations or synthesis runs or place and route jobs without a plan. For design teams that might have access to this type of capability, it’s important to figure out ahead of time how you will use it and for how long you will need it. If you will be running more sims, which sims will they be? How will you randomize them? How will you target them to the most risky parts of the design?

“Run Lots of Experiments”

Which brings us to Jeremy Ralph’s 2nd response. This one wins the prize as best response because it was well thought out and also addressed the intention of the magic wand question: what problem could you solve that you otherwise could not have solved? Jeremy would use the resources to explore many different candidate architectures for his IP (aka chiplet) and select the best one.

One of the key benefits of the cloud is that anyone can have affordable access to 1000 CPUs if they want it. If that is the case, what sorts of new approaches could be implemented by the EDA tools in addressing design challenges? Could we implement place and route on 1000 CPUs and have it finish in an hour on a 100M gate design? Could we partition formal verification problems into smaller problems and solve what was formerly the unsolvable? Could we run lots more simulations to find the one key bug that will kill our chip? The cloud opens up a whole new set of possibilities.

__________

I’ve learned a lot from your responses. Some were expected and some were not. That’s what’s fun about doing this type of research … finding the unexpected. I’ll definitely give it some thought.

harry the ASIC guy

My last blog post, entitled The Weakest Lynx, got a lot of attention from the Synopsys Lynx CAEs and Synopsys marketing. Please go see the comments on that post for a response from Chris Smith, the lead support person for Lynx at Synopsys. Meanwhile, the final part of this series … The Missing Lynx.

About 7 months ago, I wrote a blog post entitled Birth of an EDA Revolution in which I first shared my growing excitement over the potential for cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to transform EDA. About a week later, Cadence announced a SaaS offering that provides their reference flows, their software, and their hardware for rent to projects on a short-term basis. About a week after that, I wrote a third post on this topic, asking WWSD (what will Synopsys do) in response to Cadence.

In that last post, I wrote the following:

Synopsys could probably go one better and offer a superior solution if it wanted to, combining their DesignSphere infrastructure and Pilot Design Environment.  If fact, they have done this for select customers already, but not as a standard offering. There is some legwork that they’d need to do, but the real barrier is Synopsys itself. They’ve got to decide to go after this market and put together a standard offering like Cadence has … And while they are at it, if they host it on a secure cloud to make it universally accessible and scalable, and if they offer on-demand licensing, and if they make it truly open by allowing third party tools to plug into their flow, they can own the high ground in the upcoming revolution.

Although I wrote this over 6 months ago, I don’t think I could have written it better today. The only difference is that Pilot has now become Lynx. “The ASIC Cloud”, as I call it, would look something like this:

As I envision it, Synopsys Lynx will be the heart of The ASIC Cloud and will serve to provide the overall production design flow. The Runtime Manager will manage the resources including provisioning of additional hardware (CPU and storage) and licenses, as needed. The management cockpit will provide real-time statistics on resource utilization so the number of CPUs and licenses can be scaled on-the-go. Since The ASIC Cloud is accessible through any web browser, this virtual design center is accessible to large corporate customers and to smaller startups and consultants. It’s also available to run through portable devices such as netbooks and smartphones.

If you think I’m insane, you may be right, I may be crazy. But it just might be a lunatic you’re looking for. To show you that this whole cloud computing thing is not just my fever (I have been sick this past week), take a look at what this one guy in Greece did with Xilinx tools. He basically pays < $1 per hour to access hardware to run Xilinx synthesis tools on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Now, this is nothing like running an entire RTL2GDSII design flow, but he IS running EDA tools on the cloud, taking advantage of pay-as-you go CPU and storage resources, and taking advantage of multiple processors to speed up his turnaround time. The ASIC Cloud will be similar and on a much greater scale.

It may take some time for Synopsys to warm up to this idea, especially since it is a whole new business model for licensing software. But for a certain class of customers (startups, design services providers) it has definite immediate benefits. And many of these customers are also potential Lynx customers.

So, Synopsys, if you want to talk, you know where to find me.

__________

That wraps up my 5-part series on Synopsys Lynx. If you want to find the other 4 parts, here they are:

Part 1 - Synopsys Lynx Design System Debuts at SNUG

Part 2 - Lynx Design System? - It’s The Flow, Stupid!

Part 3 - Strongest Lynx

Part 4 - The Weakest Lynx

harry the ASIC guy

I stopped by a lunchtime presentation yesterday given by the local Synopsys AC. He was updating my client on what was new in Design Compiler and other tools when he put up a slide that said something like this:

set_max_area 0 (now default setting)

For those who don’t know what this means, it tells the synthesis engine to try to make the design area as small as possible, which is obviously a desirable goal. Why would anyone ever want to set their area goal higher? If you’ve used Design Compiler before, you know that this has been somewhat of a running joke, a command that was in each and every synthesis script every written, as follows:

set_max_area 0

So it got me thinking. Were there any other artifacts of a bygone EDA era that were still were hanging around, like a running joke, that had served their purpose and needed to be put to rest. Of course there were, or I would not be writing this post. Here are 3:

1) Perpetual licenses. As Paul McClellan points out on his excellent EDA Graffiti blog, in the early days of EDA “the business model was the same business model as most hardware was sold: you bought the hardware, digitizers, screens and so on… And you paid an annual maintenance contract for them to keep it all running which was about 15-20% of the hardware cost per year.” EDA companies loved perpetual licenses for 2 reasons.

1. They got to recognize all the revenue for the purchase at the time of the sale, so they were able to show better numbers on the books quicker.
2. Once you “bought” the software, you only paid a small fee each year for maintenance. If you wanted to switch to another competitor’s tool, you’d need to pay that up-front perpetual license cost again, which was a real disincentive to switch. Basically, they could lock you in.

Even though most EDA companies have gone to a subscription license model, some still predominantly license software as perpetual. With the advent of short term licensing like Cadence’s eDaCard and Synopsys’ e-licensing, the perpetual model is as outdated as Sarah Palin.

2) Large direct sales teams. I need to be really careful here, because I worked in various customer facing roles at Synopsys for almost 15 years and I still have several friends who work in direct sales at various EDA companies. Many of them are very skilled and I don’t want to cause them to lose their jobs. But the fact is that all of us rely on “the Web” to get information on all things, including EDA tools, much more than we rely on salespeople. I’m part of the older generation (although I don’t feel or act that way), but the newer generation of customers views the internet in all its forms (static web pages, social networks, blogs, podcasts, twitter) like the air that they breath. They can’t live without it. And if you think they are going to want to have to schedule a visit from a “salesperson” to get access to a tool they are interested in, then you don’t have a clue about what these people expect. They expect to go to a web page, log in (maybe), and be off and running. And if your tool ain’t accessible that way, sorry, they’re not interested. Of course, that sounds shortsighted, but that’s they way it is and will be, like it or not.

This does not mean that some direct sales has no use or value. After all, a company is writing the check, not an individual with a credit card. And sophisticated customers will still (for now) want to install software and use it, so they will still need support. So there will still be a need for some direct sales and support, but much of the early stages of the sales process will move to the Web.

3)  Closed tool suites and solutions. As I stated in a previous post, most EDA companies seek to fence customers in rather than provide streams to nourish them. With all due regards to folks like Karen Bartleson and Dennis Brophy who have unselfishly worked to promote standards, we fall far short of the goals of the Cad Framework Initiative, which sought to enable true plug-n-play interoperability between EDA tools. It’s definitely getting better, due mostly to customer pressure. But we still have a long way to go before we have truly standard standards that enable collaboration between EDA suppliers. So, if you’re an EDA company, get with the standards.

That’s just 3. I’m sure there’s more. Let me know if you come up with others:

harry the ASIC guy

Since conducting the Verification Methodology Poll and publishing the raw results last week, I’ve been planning to follow up with a post that digs a little deeper into the numbers. Things have gotten rather busy in the meantime, both at work and with organizing the SaaS and Cloud Computing EDA Roundtable for next week at DVCon. So I’ve let it slip a little.

Well, I noticed today that the verification methodology poll was referenced in a Cadence blog post by Adam Sherer. The results were somewhat mis-interpreted (in my opinion), so that kicked my butt to post my own interpretations to set the record straight. Says Adam:

According to the poll conducted by Harry Gries in his Harry the ASIC Guy blog, you should go “all in” on the OVM because it is the 2:1 favorite.

In fact, the raw results had VMM with 80 users and OVM with 125 users, a ratio of just over 1.5:1 (1.5625 to be exact). So the 2:1 ratio is not accurate. However, if you add in RVM/Vera users to the VMM numbers, and then add in AVM, eRM, and e users to the OVM numbers, that ratio is more like 1.8:1. Closer, but still not 2:1.

It also indicates that my poll says that “you should go ‘all in’ on the OVM”. I never said that nor does the poll say anything about what you “should do”. The data simply captures what people are planning on using next. If you are inclined to follow the majority, then perhaps OVM is the way to go. By contrast, there is nothing in the poll comparing the technical merits of the various methodologies. So, if you are inclined to make up your own mind, then you have some work to do and my poll won’t help you on that. You’re probably better off visiting JL Gray at Cool Verification.

No poll is perfect and it will be interesting to compare to DVCon and John Cooley polls to see if they are consistent. Here are a few other interesting stats that I pulled out of the poll results:

• 91% of respondents are using some sort of SystemVerilog methodology
• 10% are using both OVM and VMM (although I suspect many of these are consultants)
• 27% are still using e or Vera (more e than Vera)
• 4% are using ONLY VHDL or Verilog (this number may be low due to the skew of respondents towards advanced methodologies)

Again, I welcome you to download the raw data, which you can find in PDF format and as an Excel workbook, and draw your own conclusions.

harry the ASIC guy

I’ve been writing about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing as relates to EDA for some time now. Then back in January I made a New Years resolution to organize a SaaS EDA roundtable at the 2009 Design and Verification Conference (DVCon).  About a month ago I asked for volunteers and several of you have stepped up to help. Now, just a week before DVCon, I’d like to formally announce the event.

The SaaS and Cloud Computing Roundtable will be held from 6:30 - 8:00 pm on Wed Feb 25th in the Monterey/Carmel rooms at the San Jose Doubletree Hotel. This is immediately following the DVCon reception down the hall, so grab a drink and a bite and then wander on over.

SaaS and Cloud Computing are 2 of the hottest trends in the Information Technology and software industries. Some EDA companies have already put their toes in the water. This roundtable will explore the following question: Are they trailblazing the future of the industry or are they chasing an empty fad?

The format will consist of 5 brief (< 10 minute) presentations from people involved in various perspectives in SaaS and cloud computing for EDA:

• Harry Gries (Design Methodology Consultant @ the ASIC guy)
• James Colgan (CEO @ Xuropa)
• Susan Peterson (Verification IP Marketing Manager @ Cadence)
• Jeremy Ralph (CEO @ PDTi)
• Bill Alexander (VP Marketing @ Blue Pearl Software)

This will be followed by an open, and hopefully lively, discussion.

I’m greatly looking forward to this event, especially since I get to collaborate with such a high-powered team and I have no idea what to expect. I truly believe that this could be one of the more interesting events at DVCon this year.

I hope to see many of you there.

harry the ASIC guy

Last week I initiated a poll of verification methodologies being used for functional verification of ASICs. Unlike other polls or surveys, this one was done in a very “open” fashion using a website that allows everyone to view the raw data. In this way, anyone can analyze the data and draw the conclusions that make sense to them, and those conclusions can be challenged and debated based on the data.

What happened next was interesting. Within 48 hours, the poll had received almost 200 responses from all over the world. It had garnered the attention of the big EDA vendors who solicited their supporters to vote. And, as a result, had became a focal point for shenanigans from over-zealous VMM and OVM fans.  I had several long nights digging through the data and now I am ready to present the results.

As promised, here is the raw data in PDF format and as an Excel workbook. The only change I have made is to remove the names of the individual 249 respondents.

In summary, the results are as follows:

(Note: The total is more than the 249 respondents because one respondent could be using more than one methodology.)

Regarding the big 3 vendors, the data shows a remarkable consistency with Gary Smith’s market share data. There are 85 respondents planning to use the Synopsys methodologies (VMM,RVM, or Vera) and there are 150 respondents planning to use the Mentor or Cadence methodologies (OVM, AVM, eRM, e). That represents 36% for Synopsys and 64% for Mentor/Cadence. Gary’s data shows Synopsys with 34% market share, Mentor with 35%, and Cadence with 30%.

I’ll share some more insights in upcoming posts. In the meantime, please feel free to offer any insights that you have through your comments. Remember, you too have access to the raw data. This invitation includes the EDA vendors. And feel free to challenge my conclusions … but back it up with data!

harry the ASIC guy

While growing up in the concrete jungle of New York (Brooklyn to be exact), I developed an interest in the natural world that I got to see too little of. I almost never missed a Sunday night episode of Marlon Perkins and Jim Fowler on Wild Kingdom.  And now, of course, there are dozens of regular shows on the Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel, and on and on and on.

If you’ve watched any of these shows then you know that there is a universal truth in nature. Where there is water, there will be life.  Find a stream and you will find water which nourishes plant life which is food for small animals which are food for larger animals. A stream becomes an oasis of life … a little ecosystem that supports itself and flourishes.

Once they find such an oasis, animals won’t leave on their own.   Even if there may be something better far away, it’s not worth the risk of the trip, because they have all they need. But sometimes nature intervenes. Perhaps there is a drought and the water dries up and the plants fade away. Then the animals have no choice but to look for “greener pastures”.

When animals were first domesticated, shepherds understood this principle and concerned themselves primarily with the care of the flock (imagine some pristine image of David). They knew that the sheep would not stray as long as they were provided for. Ranchers understood this as well, but eventually the they started to worry about other ranchers rustling cattle.  So they built fences to keep the cattle rustlers out and to keep their cattle from straying.

In business, companies have a choice … to focus their time and efforts on creating streams that satisfy their customers’ needs or to create fences to keep the customers in and the competition out. In EDA, the industry leaders have done both.

• More than a decade ago, Synopsys was an innovator by creating SolvIt! (now Solvnet), a 24/7/365 available knowledge database that enables uncountable designers to solve problems on the weekend or in the middle of the night. I have spoken to several Synopsys customers who cite Solvnet as one of the key reasons they stay with Synopsys tools. Solvnet is a stream.
• Just a few months ago, Cadence launched it’s Online User Community. Extended from it’s existing user forums, this community offers access to Cadence and designer tool expertise and interaction with those driving the direction of future tools. This is also a stream.
• Over the last several years, Synopsys has resisted customer requests to offer short-term (e.g. monthly or weekly) licenses for peak use, so that customers could match their license usage with peak needs. They feared that such an offering would jeopardize longer term sales and  lower switching costs for customers. This is a fence. (To be fair, Synopsys has recently started offering short-term e-licensing options)
• Cadence recently kicked dozens of competitors out of its Connections Program. This is a fence.

I’m not such an idealist to think that EDA companies will focus entirely on creating streams and not consider the competition.  That would be foolhardy. But there is a corporate culture, a corporate mission, that is either focused on the customer or focused on the competition.  That’s a key difference.

There has been a lot of discussion lately about Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service for EDA. Some feel it is inevitable. Others point out all the barriers that exist.  Ultimately, I think it boils down to one simple question:

• Does the EDA industry as a whole, and do EDA companies individually, see their mission as creating streams or building fences?

If just one company sets as it’s mission to build a cloud computing stream, a SaaS oasis, to nourish the design community, then it’s going to happen. And designers and customers will come.

On the other hand, if the EDA industry focuses on building fences to lock customers into long-term agreements, to discourage interoperability, and to squash standardization efforts, then nothing will change and the industry will dry up and die.

It’s up to you. Go build a stream.

harry the ASIC guy

Considering what I’ve been hearing about the status of the Accellera VIP Subcommitee activity regarding OVM / VMM integration, I was rather surprised to see the following synchronized press releases from Mentor and Cadence yesterday:

• Mentor Solution for OVM Reuse of Legacy VMM Code
• Cadence Open Source OVM Adoption for VMM Users

As I understand, the Accellera VIP Subcommittee has just recently begun tackling the real crux issues regarding integrating the 2 methodologies such as:

• Casting of disparate types
• Synchronization of the simulation phases
• Message reporting

My speculation is that Mentor and Cadence are just now formally announcing the availability of the “fixed up” VMM code that had previously leaked out in a blog post by JL Gray.

Does anyone out there know what’s really in this release? It would be good to hear directly from the vendors on this.

How about OVM on VCS? Has anybody been able to get that working?

harry the ASIC guy

I spoke to a friend of mine at Cadence yesterday morning.

“I came in this morning and tried to log on and I couldn’t.  Turns out I must have mistyped my password, but I was worried there for a minute.”

That seems to sum up the mood at Cadence yesterday as the Turk made his way through the hallways of Cadence worldwide. “I think I’m going to go on vacation for the rest of the day”, my friend said later.

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard it from friends, or read it in EE Times or on John Blyler’s blog, that Cadence cut “at least” 625 jobs or 12% of it’s workforce.  John Blyler’s sources say the impact will be closer to 1000 jobs once contractors and others are added in.

The speculation has been going on for several weeks including an interesting exchange on the Yahoo message boards as to how deeply and in what manner Cadence would cut.  Would they take out a scalpel and trim the fat from organizations across the board?  Or would they focus on key areas with technological advantage and hatchet off areas that were non-competitive? Cadence CTO Ted Vucurevich mocked the idea that Cadence would sell off any businesses. Yet, the official press release says that Cadence “emphasized those market segments where Cadence enjoys a leadership position, such as mixed-signal design, advanced verification, and low-power design”, implying it was de-emphasizing other businesses.

So … do we have any idea if these cuts were made with a scalpel or with a hatchet? Here is what I’ve been able to pick up from others regarding what Cadence is doing to save expenses:

• From the official 8-K report: “(e) Cadence has determined that no payment shall be made to Cadence’s named executive officers or the other participants in the Cadence Senior Executive Bonus Plan for performance in fiscal 2008.” I don’t think this eliminates the golden parachute, but at least it weighs a little less.
• At least some middle management was let go, including first line managers and some long-time Cadence employees. It seems they are trying to cut the “deadwood” like any organization does now and again but from the management side first. And the impact to the rank and file seems to be less than it could have been. Still, having gone through similar times at Synopsys before, I know that a lot of these people are experienced EDA veterans and good people to have in the organization and I wish them well.
• All, or a substantial part of their tech pubs was let go. (Makes sense since they can contract this out).
• IT was hit, though not sure how deep. (Can always move their infrastructure to the cloud or outsource IT - now wouldn’t that be ironic).
• Berkeley Labs was hit hard or perhaps even shut down (who needs research?)
• Their DFT R&D group was impacted, perhaps a signal as to their plans for this product line (just a bunch of IBMers anyway).

As yet, there is no indication that entire products are going away, but it’s still early.  Cadence has yet to speak to the investment community since the Fister resignation and delaying their earnings release due to the discovery of an “accounting error”. Personally, I think it will be painful for a company that has endeavored to provide a “complete flow”, to sell off a product and create a hole in that flow.  If they do sell off products, it will be around the edges, not in the core EDA flow.

Take a look at Gary Smith’s analysis from the time that Cadence bid to take over Mentor (can you believe it’s been  just over 4 months since the offer). The tools where Cadence has low market share and are possible targets for the hatchet:

• Design for Manufacturing
• Physical Verification
• Design For Test
• Static Timing Analysis
• Synthesis

What do you think? Can you see Cadence divesting any of these products?  Or do you think there are others that might go away? Which product would you definitely not let go?

Inquiring minds want to know….

harry the ASIC guy