Build Your Own EDA Tool

Without Competing With the Big Guys

by Bryon Moyer - Electronic Engineering Journal, Feb. 16, 2015 – 

So your company needs to design a system-on-chip (SoC). On the one hand, there's a lot of that going around. On the other hand, the cost of doing an SoC - especially on an aggressive silicon node - is so expensive that the number of companies that have the cash to do that is decreasing.

Which limits the number of competitors to a certain degree. But you're still going to have competitors. How are you going to make sure that, when system builders are looking for an SoC, they choose yours?

That's how a standard product marketing discussion might go, but things can work differently with SoCs, While you might find merchant-market SoCs for, say, a communications protocol like Bluetooth or for power management, many SoCs are created by, or on spec for, system builders, so presumably the feature set has been tuned to be exactly what the system needs. So, really, it's the system architects that are defining the differentiating aspects of the system, and the SoC is "merely" an implementation of those features.

Which would suggest that the SoC itself has less impact on the success of the system. But if the features themselves aren't a hallmark of the SoC, the usual real-world impact of the SoC is enormously relevant: How fast does it go? How quickly will it drain your battery (or brown out your town)? And will it support the economics of a profitable system?

And then there's the other biggie: did you get the chip out fast enough to grab that early chunk of the market?

According to Invionics, this exposes competition on a different level. It's not about the bells and whistles on your product: it's about your SoC design process. The general idea is that companies that are more competent at IC design will have more competitive products.

Invionics is an EDA startup, but, unlike most EDA startups, it's not trying to compete directly with the Big EDA Guys. And it's not trying to outdo something the Big Guys already do in the hopes that one of the Big Guys will buy them. (They still might want a Big Guy to buy them; I have no idea. But that's neither here nor there for our purposes - the point is orthogonality.)

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