Some Thoughts on the Future of the EDA Market

[Bhavesh]

Towards the end of last year I was contacted by Pete Waddell of UP Media Group (responsible for magazines such as Printed Circuit Design and Fabrication). I have met Pete a number of times, and as we spoke on the phone, he discussed a new article he was writing on the future of the EDA market. My responses (and that of other members of our industry) can be found at http://bit.ly/56kyuw).

Pete did have to truncate some of my answers for the purposes of space. So I thought I could provide some of my responses here in full:

What tool or types of tool(s) need to be improved for today’s’ designs or design process?

For the most part engineers have a wide variety of tools available, each of which focus on a particular niche in the design flow (for which they are fantastic). The problem however, is that the EDA industry has forgotten that the design flow needs to be considered holistically. Schematic capture environments must integrate with simulation, layout, validation, fabrication and manufacturing in order to help streamline the approach of the engineer. Far too often EDA companies focus on just a handful of these stages, and it has resulted in a disjointed and difficult process for the average engineer.

Engineers have the tools that they need for a specific task, but the interoperability of that environment with the rest of the tasks of the design flow need to be improved. As engineers continue to evolve into “domain experts”, responsible for a number of different tasks during the design flow, it becomes ever more important that the EDA industry develop the connective tissue between each stage. Working with NI customers we rapidly found that we need to facilitate that transition from concept, to schematic, to simulation, through to layout, fabrication and validation. Anything hindering the user’s transition to each stage diminishes productivity.

We need to facilitate faster and smarter design [Ed. it looks like Pete used this part of my response for his title ]. We have come a long way as an industry in making tools powerful enough to cope with ever more complex design tasks. However it is not until we look to the design flow holistically, and provide that integrated flow that we truly help improving the productivity of our customers.

Is there an emerging technology that will demand a fundamental change to the design or manufacturing process for PCBs?

There are two separate things that will drive the need for improved design tools.

First, productivity and efficiency will continue to be a major factor in driving the vision for EDA tools and EDA suppliers. This will require continuing to abstract away complexities in the design process, as well as streamlining the design flow through improved integration.

Second, we will continue to see a movement of engineers to embedded technology to deploy the “brains” of their designs. We have seen that in particular, with Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), which have continued to be employed in countless designs. This will continue to move us in the direction of co-design between the embedded device and the PCBs that will help to interface that IC to the real world signals.

Hopefully that helps to provide a little more context to some of our thoughts here on design of PCBs.

Till next time,

Bhavesh

P.S. My interesting fact of the day - the "UP" in UP Media stands for "Uncle Pete". It truly is amazing what you can find out, when attending a tradeshow!