Panelists find EDA tool quality lacking

Panelists find EDA tool quality lacking
SAN JOSE, Calif. — EDA software quality lags that of other industries, and isn't likely to improve as tool vendors struggle to create tools that keep up with silicon innovations, according to panelists at the International Symposium on the Quality of Electronic Design (ISQED) here Wednesday, March 26. But vendors and customers can work together to improve things, panelists agreed.

Panelists noted that the EDA industry has roughly 5,000 tool developers/architects who must maintain older technologies, while at the same time creating new tools to solve the extremely complex problems of ever-evolving silicon processes. Thus the relatively small number of developers, tool complexity, and time constraints ill effect quality of tools.

Panelist Rich Goldman, Synopsys' director of business and technology programs, said that on a scale from 1 to 10 — with 10 being the highest — eighty percent of EDA tools rank between 1 and 4 (Poor to Needing Improvement) in terms of quality, and the best and most mature of EDA offerings only rank a 6 (or Good).

"No EDA tools rank 'Excellent' or 'World Class,'" said Goldman, citing a study by the Software Engineering Institute. But only 10 percent of all software ranks "Excellent" and only five percent is considered "World Class," he noted.

But are users concerned? In a Synopsys customer survey, Goldman said, 60 percent counted new features as their biggest concern, 20 pointed to better tool interoperability, and 20 percent ranked quality as the most important issue.

Gary Smith, EDA analyst with research firm Dataquest, said that quality is becoming a bigger issue and that interoperability is becoming less of an issue. He noted that interoperability soaked up as much as 26 to 29 percent of engineering time in 2001, but that level has gone down to 14 percent in 2002, as design groups adapt design platforms or single vendor all-in-one tool solutions.

Rob Mains, senior design automation architect at Sun Microsystems, noted that tool developers have to wait for new silicon processes to be developed, understand those processes, and then create new tools for those processes. And then even after processes come online, he said, issues such as signal integrity and IR drop emerge, meaning new features have to be developed.

Shishpal Rawat, a director of EDA investments at Intel, said that Intel uses a rigorous approval process before tools are brought into its MPU design flow. "Before we deploy a tool, we do an exploration and development assessment, weighing issues to see if functionality is there and whether it is stable enough," said Rawat. "If it's good enough we will stick with that tool and that version until the design is finished."

He said Intel often standardizes on tools and reuses 70 percent of the same tools for subsequent designs. He noted that new versions of tools introduce new functionality, but often a whole new batch of bugs. He said reducing the amount of bugs in revisions would be extremely helpful, and would allow users to take advantage of new functionality more readily.

All panelists said that vendor-customer cooperation is imperative to improving quality of tools. But Goldman noted that users could better help EDA vendors improve tool quality by providing vendors with complete design test cases to put new tools through their paces.

"We all know actual mileage will vary based on real conditions," agreed Mains. "We need to provide vendors with realistic test cases."

Yu-Chin Hsu, vice president of R&D at Novas Software, said that users often give EDA vendors a small part of a test case design to test tools, but this may not allow EDA vendors to discover corner case errors that occur in the context of the whole design. And finding these issues during deployment, as opposed to finding them in evaluation, can be catastrophic.

"I often hear from users why should I beta test your software, what's in it for me," said Goldman. "Sometimes I think they should pay us for beta testing," he said, noting that often times beta testing will find errors in design style or older designs that were previously undetected.

Rawat and Mains both said they welcome beta testing opportunities. Both Rawat and Mains identified circuit simulation and analysis as the area most in need of newer, quality tools, and said they're more than willing to test new technologies in this area.