Design Tool Think Tank Required

When I was in the EDA industry as a technologist, there were three main parts to my role. The first was to tell customers about new technologies being developed and tool extensions that would be appearing in the next release. These were features they might find beneficial both in the projects they were undertaking today, and even more so, would apply to future projects. Second, I would try and find out what new issues they were finding, or where the tools were not delivering the capabilities they required. This would feed into tool development planning. And finally, I would take those features selected by the marketing team for implementation and try to work out how best to implement them if it wasn’t obvious to the development teams.

By far the most difficult task out of the three was getting new requirements from customers. Most engineers have their heads down, concentrating on getting their latest chip out. When you ask them about new features, the only thing they offer are their current pain points. These usually involve incremental features or bugs, where the workaround is disliked, or insufficient performance.

Thirty years ago, when I first started doing that role, there were dedicated methodology groups within the larger companies whose job it was to develop flows and methodologies for future projects. This would appear to be the ideal people to ask, but in many cases they were so disconnected from the development team that what they asked for would never actually be used by the development team. These groups were idealists who wanted to instill revolutionary changes, whereas the development teams wanted evolutionary tools. The furthest many of those developments went was pilot projects that never became mainstream.

It seems as if the industry needs a better path to get requirements into the EDA companies. This used to be defined by the ITRS, which would look forward and project the new capabilities that would be required and the timeframes for them. That no longer exists. Today, standards are being driven by semiconductor companies. This is a change from the past, where we used to see the EDA companies driving the developments done within groups like Accellera. When I look at their recent undertakings, most of them are driven by end users.

Getting a standards group started today happens fairly late in the process. It implies an immediate need, but does not really allow time for solutions to be developed ahead of time. It appears that a think tank is required where the industry can discuss issues and problems for which new tool development is required. That can then be built into the EDA roadmaps so that the technology becomes available when it is needed.

One such area is power analysis. I have been writing stories about how important power and energy is becoming and may indeed soon become the limiter for many of the most complex designs. Some of the questions I always ask are:

• What tools are being developed for doing power analysis of software?
• How can you calculate the energy consumed for a given function?
• How can users optimize a design for power or energy?

I rarely get straight answers to any of these questions. Instead, I’m often given vague ideas about how a user could do this in a manual fashion given the tools currently available.

I was beginning to think I was barking up the wrong tree and perhaps these were not legitimate concerns. My sanity was restored by a comment on one of my recent power related stories. Allan Cantle, OCP HPC Sub-Project Leader at Open Compute Project Foundation, wrote: “While it’s great to see articles like this highlight the need for us all to focus on energy centric computing, the sad news is that our tools don’t report energy in any obvious way to show the stupid architectural mistakes we often make from an energy consumption perspective. We are solving all the problems from a bottoms-up perspective by bringing things closer together. While that does bring tremendous energy efficiency benefits, it also creates massively increasing energy density. There is so much low-hanging fruit from a top-down system architecture approach that the industry is missing because we need to think outside the box and across our silos.”

Cantle went on to say: “A trivial improvement in tools that report energy consumption as a first-class metric will make it far easier for us to understand and rectify the mistakes we make as we build new energy-centric, domain-specific computers for each application. Alternatively, the silicon gods that rule our industry would be wise to take a step backward and think about the problem from a systems level perspective.”

I couldn’t agree more, and I find it frustrating that no EDA company seems to be listening. I am sure part of the problem is that the large customers are working on their own internal solutions, and they feel it will provide them with a competitive advantage. Until it becomes clear that all of their competitors have similar solutions, and that they no longer get an advantage from it, then they will look to transfer those solutions to the EDA companies so they do not have to maintain them. The EDA companies will then start to fight to make the solution they have acquired the standard. It all takes a long time.

In partial defense of the EDA companies, they are facing so many new issues these days that they are spread very thin dealing with new nodes, 2.5D, 3D, shift left, multi-physics, AI algorithms – to name just a few. They already spend more on R&D than most technology companies as a percentage of revenue.

Perhaps Accellera could start to include discussion forums in events like DVCon. This would allow for an open discussion about the problems they need to have solved. Perhaps they could start to produce the EDA equivalent of the old ITRS roadmap. It sure would save a lot of time and energy (pun intended).