Register Bits

Everyone in chip design uses a browser - there’s little doubt in that. I’d wager that most chip designers spend more time in a browser than in any other tool, including the command line, emacs or vi text editor, the Eclipse IDE, and the logic simulator.

Today, chip designers are likely to use a browser for:

• Looking at various indexes of technical documentation in HTML and PDF, including IP and register map specifications and document control
• Viewing development reports, test coverage data and analysis
• Researching suppliers, IP, algorithms, technical standards, how to articles, …
• Managing bugs
• Collaborating through a Wiki
• Accessing various other information on the corporate Intranet
• Reading EE Times and Slashdot while waiting for that long test-case, simulation or synthesis job to complete

Though not a chip designer anymore, I’ve been spending more time working in a browser, especially now that I’ve warmed up to Google Apps. And I’m not alone. I’ve even heard of some chip design companies using it too. Now that the word is out that Google is building chips, there is a good chance that they’d use Google Apps. Let’s face it, there is a lot of spreadsheet work in chip design and Google Spreadsheets is quite powerful, especially in a collaborative context. There is also a lot of block diagram work too and Google’s new Drawings tool offers hope there. Whether you like web-apps or not, I think most chip designers would agree, the browser is increasingly used for legitimate work.

There are many areas in chip dev where the browser can play a bigger role, especially in a collaborative context. One recent example, is Synopsys’ Lynx Design System which appears to have a browser GUI for it’s Management Cockpit. At PDTi we’ve been pushing the limits of using the browser for all things register management, for capturing and modelling the executable specification and generating dependent code and documentation.

Google has been pushing the limits of what is possible in the browser. The impressive video showing Quake II running in a browser is mind-blowing and highlights the possibilities of HTML5 and the next-gen browser. This supports the argument that graphical EDA tools such as the simulation waveform debuggers and graphical layout tools are possible and could be supplied as a web application; perhaps even under the SaaS model.

Are the naysayers missing something here - could the browser be the ubiquitous platform for everything, even EDA tools and Chip Design?

Wow, what a spectacular run the equity markets have had since the low in March of 2009.  Meanwhile, the jury is out on whether this is a sustainable recovery, backed by fundamentals and precedent? There are people calling for hyperinflation and others for deflation ahead.  With such uncertainty, opinions vary widely regarding which way things will go as illustrated by the following articles which I found interesting (followed by my point form summaries):

The Greenback Effect
NT Times Opinion Article by Warren Buffett

• “gusher of federal money” avoided meltdown & was needed to combat depression
• “economy appears to be on a slow path to recovery”
• US deficit/GDP will rise to 13% this year into uncharted territory - more than 2x the wartime record
  Continue reading…
  

Twitpic from S_Tomasello "How's the attendance at #46DAC today? Umm..."

Last week at the Moscone Center in San Fransisco, the 46th annual Design Automation Conference (DAC) took place.  I’ve attended this conference for the past 4 years and decided not to attend this year.  This year I attended virtually using the web.

In the EDA media and for EDA trade shows, as Bob Dylan sang, the times they are a-changin’.  It’s no secret that the incumbent media is struggling to find a business model that works in the uncharted waters of the future.  As history repeats itself, the “hidden hand of supply and demand” will no doubt fix some shortfall with the traditional model — a shortfall that may not be fully understood until it is solved.

With the electronic media shedding their top writers, the coverage of DAC by trade publications is diminishing.  At the same time, new media, such as blogs, Twitter, and LinkedIn are picking up some slack.  For example, Richard Goering and Michael Santarini who historically covered DAC for EETimes and EDN now write for Cadence and Xilinx respectively.  Some of the best DAC summaries that I read were blogged by:

• Peggy Aycinena’s on her Thursday’s Child (R U a Wizard of Management Warcraft?)
• Mike Demler on his “The World is Analog” blog (Highlights from the Design Automation Conference, #46DAC - Day 1)
  
• Richard Goering on his Cadence blog (Ten Takeaways From the EDA CEO Panel, 8 Design Managers Reveal Top Concerns, GPUs Or Multicore For EDA Applications?)
• JL Gray’s Cool Verification (The Past, Present and Future of the DAC)
• Paul McLellan on his EDA Graffiti blog (day 1, VC Panel, denial computing)
• Sean Murphy at SKMurphy.com (provides a great index of blog postings on the 46th DAC)

Additionally, on Twitter, the #46DAC tag provided useful information about what was going on at the tradeshow.  For me, some tweeps who provided informative DAC coverage via Twitter included:

• Dark_Faust — editor in chief of Chip Design & Embedded Intel magazines & editorial director of Extension Media
• harrytheASICguy — ASIC consultant & blogger, did a Synopsys XYZ conversation central sessions at DAC
• jlgray — Consultant with Verilab, photographer, coolverification.com blogger, conference presenter
• karenbartleson — Sr. Director of Community Marketing at Synopsys and blogger on “The Standards Game.”  Karen won “EDA’s Next Top Blogger” at DAC.  Karen did a lot of tweeting to inform people about the #46DAC and Synopsys Conversation Central had a “Twitter Tower” that displayed the #46DAC stream.
• MikeDemler — Tech industry analyst, former marketing insider (from Synopsys), blogs at “The world is Analog”
• paycinera — EDA Confidential editor Peggy Aycinena broke her cryptic series of gobbledygook biography tweets, the EDA Town & Gown Twitter Project, to provide some of the best Twitter coverage from DAC
• S_Tomasello — Marketing at Sonics, the providers of “On-chip communications networks for advanced SoCs”

Based on the various reports and summaries from DAC, there is an apparent need for collaboration (as mentioned by keynote Fu-Chieh Hsu of TSMC) and productivity (as mentioned by the CEO panel). The same forces that are changing EDA trade media and conferences — the power of the Internet, coupled with economic forces –may enable the solution to better collaboration and productivity. Cloud computing business models like Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) are starting to prove themselves in other industries and will continue to find their way into commonplace. Exactly what the “hidden hand of supply and demand” has in store for EDA and cloud computing has yet to be revealed and we are just in the early stages now.

From various blogs and Twitter, without having attended DAC, I understand that:

• there continues to be a need for better collaboration, productivity, and higher levels of abstraction
• today’s current economic situation, spurred by the US credit melt-down, has affected EDA
  • the traditional trade media is struggling
  • new chip design starts are down
  • Magma design Automation, released that they are re-negotiating debt as a result of an audit report regarding their solvency, just as the conference was kicking off
  • traffic on the trade floor was questionable: some said it was above expectations while others said it was below
  • new VC investment in EDA start-ups is pretty much non-existent
  • TSMC is becoming more and more of an ecosystem heavyweight
  • there is optimism about the future and the recovery of EDA — with change and crisis, there comes opportunity for those who see it
• the media landscape is changing
  • there is a struggle between the blogsphere and traditional press to cover EDA
  • blogs are gaining acceptance and playing more and more of a role
  • filtering through and connecting disperse info is a problem
  • John Cooley dismisses the utility of blogging, LinkedIn and Twitter and critics say Cooley just doesn’t get it (or virtual platforms and virtual prototypes for that matter)
• there are big opportunities for Software design, and EDA can play there
  • Embedded software has the possibility to double EDA, says Gary Smith, who has pointed to software as the problem for several years now
  • embedded software seats are growing but market is fragmented
  • software IP is of growing importance in the differentiation of SoC platforms
  • the programming models need to change for multi-core
  • multi-core and parallel computing programming models are still pretty low level, like assembly and micro-code
  • Mentor Graphics announced their acquisition of Embedded Alley Solutions, a leader in Android and Linux development systems, unveiling their new Android & Linux strategy
• System Level is big, particularly for SoC virtual platforms, architectural optimization and IP
  • the SPIRIT Consortium and IP-XACT has merged into Accellera, and there continues to be a need for better standards
  • IP still has a lot of potential and the business model is becoming clearer
  • Despite the importance of ESL, much work is still done at lower levels of abstraction
  • ARC International, the IP and configurable processor provider, is rumored to be under acquisition
• FPGA
  • Companies are moving to FPGAs and away from ASIC
  • ESL is big for FPGAs
  • Not nearly as much FPGA discussion at DAC as there should be
• Cloud computing opportunities are being underlooked by EDA (let’s start with the on-site private cloud then look at multi-tenant ecosystem clouds)

In conclusion, I was able to absorb a lot of details about DAC without attending thanks to all the bloggers, Tweeters and trade media.  EDA is changing in some exciting ways that scream opportunity for some and failure for others, and that’s what makes the future so exciting.

EDA Veteran Paul McLellan recently wrote an entry in his EDA Graffiti blog entitled SaaS for EDA.  Being a vendor providing the only real SaaS tool for register automation, I was naturally excited. I was a bit less enthused when McLellan indicated on twitter (he tweeted) that he didn’t think SaaS for EDA would fly.  Upon reading his blog posting, it seems his position is more along the lines that SaaS for EDA will not fly for the traditional, EDA bread and butter applications.  He did indicate that SaaS for EDA does have a chance for the front-end of chip design and for FPGA flows.  This is good to hear because it aligns with our coordinates at PDTi, where we focus on the firmware/software register interface.

I started to write a comment for McLellan’s posting but soon realized that I had a lot to say - more than should really be put in a comment.  Hence I decided to write this RegisterBits blog entry.

In general, I know about the front end of EDA tool-flows and not much about the back end.  That being said, having worked with complex IC development flows at Intel and a smaller startup, I understand how there is a common back-end flow and files are large.  At the RTL level and above it’s not so clear cut, there are often many different point tools, files are small, and each project can use a different set of tools and scripts.  Whether a point tool runs on the local machine or remote machine really makes no difference in this case, with negligible files sizes and local scripting environments that can access remote point-tools using web APIs.

McLellan assumes a tool/hour pricing model, and claims that using a metered usage pricing would not cause prices to go down.  With SaaS, however, there could be many different pricing models that better align the value between the user and vendor.  Pricing could be based on a project, per-user, or per unit of complexity (register, gate, area, …).  If the fabs were to take hold of the SaaS model and offer EDA tools, since they know the production output they could even use a royalty based pricing model.  If you look at the current EDA floating seat model, the longer jobs run for the more seats sold, and the more money for the EDA companies.  Could it be that EDA vendors using a per-seat model don’t have the incentive to improve runtimes as much as they could?

Another objection is that SaaS doesn’t work well with highly interactive software.  This has been true in the past, but is less and less true all the time with AJAX rich-client applications like Google maps.  If Google maps can do the magic that they do then I would argue that place and route and graphical waveform viewers are reasonably possible today.  For the most part, though, there is very little graphical instructiveness in EDA.

Perhaps the greatest SaaS for EDA benefit is the opportunity to reduce the maintenance and infrastructure costs that are so high for the traditional on-premise tools. Installing, patching, and upgrading EDA tools is a huge cost that must be considered into the total cost of ownership.  SaaS ends the customers’ maintenance of the application and enables the customer to focus more on value added differentiating work while the vendor manages the maintenance.  This is much more economical and cost effective.  Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff circulated an internal note related to the “End of Maintenance,” which is an excellent read on this very topic.    Then, there is always the argument that chip designers want to control what version of the tool they are using so everything is repeatable.  There are ways this can be built into the SaaS offering, and at PDTi with SpectaReg, we’ve got a way to do this.

Referring to the Innovator’s Dilemma and the way SalesForce.com disrupted the CRM market, McLellan states that EDA is not like CRM since there is no “non-competition” - under-serviced users who don’t currently have access to a tool due to it’s cost.  “EDA is not like that,” he said.  I, however, think there are certainly aspects of EDA that are like that, especially with new and innovative tools.  Register automation, where we at PDTi are focused, is one such area.  We often encounter customers who don’t have any solution (in-house or commercial), who could certainly use a solution.  There are a number of users in developing economies starting to work with EDA tools for ASIC and FPGA, who are waiting for better “legal” access to tools.  There is the embedded software industry that is starting to realize that they can use FPGA embedded processors platforms and build custom (multi) processors chips for their specialized application.  This is a new underserviced market for EDA.  It amazes me how the EDAC is so hyped up about trying to stop piracy of EDA tools, which seems futile since the hackers will almost always be able to crack or cheat the next attempt to stop them.  SaaS, however, does provide a solution to the piracy issue.  To expand into these highly price sensitive markets, EDA will need to compete on price, like it or not.

While competing on price is not ideal, SaaS has the potential to afford a better cost structure for both the producer and consumer.  More than the tool price needs to be looked at to get a true picture of the total cost of ownership.  The traditional EDA sales channel is super expensive and unnecessary in today’s Internet age.   The evaluation processes are too lengthy and difficult, the tool version release milestones are too long, onsite tool support is expensive, and the customer’s maintenance and infrastructure is very costly.  The cost of having CAD engineers worrying about tool setup and maintenance is more than just the associated labour cost - there is an opportunity cost of not focusing as intensely as possible on core competencies. A SaaS tool can evolve better based on aggregate vendor observations of usage patterns.  Also, it’s easier for the customer and vendor to work together to identify, reproduce and fix bugs.

There is much knowledge in EDA that is not packaged in an automated collaborative way.  Lincoln Murphy from 16 Ventures and Ken Boasso of Keychain Logic predict that 80% of SaaS success stories in the future will not be the CRM or ERP leaders of today’s SaaS, but rather productization of knowledge.  There is a lot of knowledge in EDA and chip design that has yet to be productized — the kind of stuff you find in the scripts, processes, procedures, emails, spreadsheets, and documents at a typical chip design company.  This could potentially be formalized into SaaS tools with a user community and network effect.

Utilizing the power of native web-applications, SaaS can bring about a new class of tools for EDA that use the Internet to help managers manage, and engineers collaborate across teams and locations.  Perhaps like a social networking application, but not social, instead it’s engineering workflow networking around the project work, tools and flows.  This is something that we’ve had good success with for our SpectaReg.com tool.  Memory mapped registers are collaborative and we tie all the stakeholders together in a formalized way.  This isn’t traditional EDA - it is a work-flow automation for electronics design, perhaps a new class of EDA that productizes what has traditionally been un-productized knowledge.

If you’re interested in EDA for SaaS be sure to join the EDA SaaS Enthusiasts LinkedIn Group.  If you are doing firmware/hardware addressable register maps, try a free demo/evaluation of SpectaReg.com.

The following presentation was prepared for the first SaaS and Cloud Computing round table at DVCon 2009.  Thanks Harry for organizing and coordinating!

It was strange to prepare this and not be there to engage with the audience for Q&A. Let’s get some comments and discussions going here using the comment feature.  What do you think about SaaS in general and for EDA?

Harry the ASIC guy, has organized a meeting at DVCon for discussing the inevitable way forward for application deployment and computing infrastructure — SaaS and Cloud computing.

The incumbent EDA overlords, being a conservative bunch with an arsenal of tools that haven’t been architected for such deployment, have been slow to catch on.  That is understandable, why would they want to change the way things are done and disrupt their entire business models?  They would need to completely change their core competencies, values, sales channels, and architectures if that’s even possible.

The EDA users, well … , it seems many are trying to figure out what the heck SaaS and Cloud Computing are. Here are my definitions for these terms:

SaaS — Software as a Service, whereby the user does not download or install any software.  Instead, the software is hosted by a service provider and available on-demand, as a subscription or pay-per-use over the Internet.  Some (like Cadence) consider the case where a VPN client is downloaded by the client and configured for accessing hosted software a SaaS too.  My definition of a “Pure SaaS” is that it must run only in a web-browser, as our SpectaReg.com register-map tool does.   Poster children for SaaS include:

• SaleForce.com
• Google Apps
• TurboTax (QuickTax for Canadian readers)
• Oracle
• SAP

Cloud Computing — The concept of having massive common compute infrastructure, offered over the Internet, and shared and optimized between  many different users and services for many different purposes.  The Cloud host maintains the compute infrastructure and essentially leases compute resources (like CPU nodes, time, memory, bandwidth, and disk space) or specialized services based on some level of granularity.  The Could essentially abstracts all the hardware, services, and related back-end work.  Amazon has a big initial presence in this.

At PDTi we’ve been working towards building our SaaS for more than 4 years.  At first we didn’t call it a SaaS, we just knew that we were building a web-application.  When we first heard the term SaaS, we hated it and were reluctant to use it.  One of my business advisers put me onto the term WebWare which I think would have been much better.  Unfortunately WebWare didn’t catch on but SaaS did.

Anyhow, Harry has been following PDTi for a while now, and is very keen on SaaS, cloud computing and how these can be applied to EDA.  Harry invited me to present at the DVCon roundtable, and I am honored to accept.  Being a web-based company, though, remote to the Silicon Valley, we’ve decided not to attend DVCon or even have boths at most conferences… for us that is old school EDA and leads to a higher cost structure.  Using the web, wherever possible, instead of costly business travel, we can achieve a lower cost structure and can pass along the savings to our customers.  So if PDTi isn’t attending DVCon, how can I present?  We’ll I’m going to pre-record my presentation, send it Harry over the web and take questions as comments on this blog, as twitter messages, and via email.  I’ll post the recorded presentation online for all to see, after the event.  Wait, actually, we will have someone live at the event, one of my business advisors from the Valley, Michale Sanie, will be in attendance.

Here are the details of the Details of the SaaS & Cloud Computing EDA RoundTable:

When: 6:30 - 8:00 pm on Wed Feb 25th

Where: Monterey/Carmel rooms at the San Jose Doubletree Hotel

Presenters:

• Harry Gries (Design Methodology Consultant @ the ASIC guy)
• James Colgan (CEO @ Xuropa)
• Susan Peterson (Verification IP Marketing Manager @ Cadence)
• Jeremy Ralph (CEO @ PDTi, yours truely)
• Bill Alexander (VP Marketing @ Blue Pearl Software)

More details are available at Harry the ASIC guy’s blog.  Many thanks to Harry for or organizing this exciting event!

If you’re wondering how this relates at all to design verification, well SpectaReg.com does auto-generate SystemVerilog Register Abstraction OVM and VMM RAL SystemVerilog from the common register Specification.

My typical day starts with a cup of coffee while I check email and browse the EETimes homepage.  Recently, I read an article entitled Rhines challenges pessimistic prognosis for EDA, which describes a DesignCon keynote by Walden Rhines, Mentor’s CEO/Chair.  The following segment from the article stuck with me:

Rhines pointed to a bright future for EDA, despite the doom-and-gloom that surrounds the industry. The number of chip designers in the world is growing he said.  While he [Rhines] joked that not all of the designers are acquiring EDA software legally at the moment, he said their companies would likely “clean that stuff up” as they matured in places like China, India and Eastern Europe.

For the most part, SaaS solves this issue — piracy of EDA software becomes a non-issue when tools are offered as a SaaS since the vendor has complete control.  The  software binaries don’t get transfered, so they cannot be pirated.  Also, as the number of chip designers in the world grow, SaaS is well positioned to achieve the required economies of scale and reduced cost structure to serve emerging markets.

We’ve decided to start a corporate blog at PDTi.  This inaugural posting is about something that’s near and dear to our hearts – using Software as a Service (SaaS) web applications for solving chip-development register automation needs. The most compelling benefits in using a SaaS business model for EDA include:

• Simplified use, support and maintenance
• Lower cost structure
• Expanded collaboration

By register automation, I’m referring to a class of tools that takes in addressable register specifications for defining the hardware interface.  This is the hardware interface that gets read and written by software.  This type of register interface goes by many different names.

Simplified use, support, and maintenance benefits come from the fact that the SaaS user can run the tool using a web-browser.  Users simply point their trusty browser to a URL, and login.  The tool vendor has complete control of the server hardware and software.  The vendor can add enhancements and fixes seamlessly, saving the end user a lot of work.

One obvious constraint with the SaaS model is data transfer requirements.  For the front-end of chip design, file sizes are not such a big issue since plain text VHDL, Verilog, SystemVerilog, and C/C++ files are relatively small.  For transferring larger files, like back-end physical design databases, the average HTTPS client/server connection may not be ideal.

Another factor that always comes up with SaaS is security.  One benefit with web-applications is that a lot of big enterprises have put a lot of money and time into how to secure web servers, and there is a lot of common knowledge in this area.  An enormous number of transactions per day occur securely over HTTPS around the world.

Intense vendor specialization and economies of scale provide the benefit of a lower cost structure.  Vendors know how to best develop, run, and maintain the tools they build.  With the vendor actively maintaining the tool, the cost structure can be lower for all parties.  Sharing the server-side compute resources among many users maximizes utility, reducing the compute nodes per user/project/company.  This also reduces the environmental costs of having un-utilized servers running.

The need for better collaboration in the chip-dev supply-chain is growing and SaaS helps to expand collaboration.   More companies are buying IP, selling IP, outsourcing work, using open-source projects, and in general collaborating with customers, partners, and suppliers.  The client/server architecture of web applications makes it possible to formalize this collaboration and make it consistently repeatable.

We have no doubts that register design automation is well suited for a SaaS business model.  In future postings we’ll examine what other types of existing and future EDA tools align with the SaaS model. If you have any thoughts on this leave a comment and let us know what you think.