原创 The Business of EDA

EDA is an outsourcing business, an estimated $5Billion and counting. This has been an evolutionary path and one that has followed the maturing of the EDA industry.
In the 1960s, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) developed and owned all the tooling. Everything was done in house, nothing was outsourced. This was the original turnkey model. A lot of money was poured into research by the big companies (OEMs in particular) and the tools were not commercially available. Eventually the tools were commercialized but not the research.
Design inflection points usually drive a new generation of tools. Thus we saw the steady march of the node towards lower and lower geometries drive a change in the EDA supplier market. The supplier market evolved from the days of Calma, Applicon and Computervision to today’s Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor.  Designs are not static and neither are the markets.
Today the research investment has shifted from the OEMs to semiconductor/systems companies who are the biggest users of EDA tools. These companies are also investing in EDA research to develop tools in house which are  either 1) not available from commercial suppliers 2) or commercial tools are not good enough , or  3) tools that semiconductor companies want to develop in house in order to maintain some competitive advantage in the design. In the next post I will explore semiconductor R & D budgets, the relationship to EDA growth and what we can expect for EDA in 2012.