Will Foundries Reaggregate Design?

Electronic News, June 5, 2000 by Gale Morrison

New YorkaTalk to EDA executives these days and you'll hear nothing if not the word "disaggregation."

According to Webster's Dictionary, disaggregation is the division of something into its constituent parts. According to EDA executives, disaggregation is what is happening to the design chain, as the role of the traditional integrated device manufacturer (IDM) continues to be divided into pieces, just as it has been for the last 10 years.

Illustrating this trend at this week's Design Automation Conference (DAC) are all manner of design-focused Web ventures like SiliconX Inc. Also reflecting the latest phase of disaggregation are several Webbed-up programs from EDA firms large and small such as the Synopsys/Avant! DesignSphere Access, which was rolled out last week, and Sonics Inc.'s "socworks.com," which is coming out today.

And, of course, there is one name at the heart of all these products: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the world's largest independent IC foundry and a major beneficiary of the disaggregation trend. TSMC's Design Service Alliance (DSA) (see chart, page 50) aims to provide the virtual equivalent of the traditional ASIC environment, Mike Pawlik, vice president of worldwide marketing for TSMC, told Electronic News.

TSMC's DSA partners include major vendors of libraries, semiconductor intellectual property (IP) and EDA tools and services. Those companies provide their wares directly to designers and the DSA offers assurance that designs using the IP, libraries and EDA software can be manufactured with TSMC's technology. TSMC has been spending tens of millions of dollars, if not much more, over the last year building the DSA. "In the aggregate, (The DSA partners) represent billions of dollars of revenue for their own sales," Pawlik wrote from Taiwan. "We're all part of an extended value-added chain with each partner contributing as part of the customer's design supply chain or manufacturing supply chain. With the disaggregated model, the contribution of the DSA group can vary greatly from customer to customer or even between design projects within the same customer.

"That's the beauty of the disaggregated environment, you only pay for what you need/use, as opposed to an ASIC approach, where IP and other costs of 'siliconizing' the design flow are amortized across all customers," he said.

TSMC's fiercest competitor, United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC), for its part is closely linked with the siliconx.com venture, which goes live today.

Synopsys and Avant! Link Up

Meanwhile, last Thursday, Aart de Geus, chairman and chief executive officer of Synopsys Inc., Mountain View, Calif., and Gerald Hsu, CEO of Avant! Corp., Fremont, Calif., were set to hop on a stage in downtown Mountain View and proclaim that they've put down their competitive differences in order to launch DesignSphere Access. DesignSphere is an Internet-based hosted design environment for start-ups and fast growing companies that allows them to quickly pick up Synopsys' front-end synthesis tools and Avant!'s back-end place-and-route tools, and all the compute power the tools require to operate.

It's a direct shot at grabbing Cadence's IC design potential new customers and it borrows a thing or two from the eDolphin business model of Monterey Design Systems Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., which was launched in March. However, Mark Milligan, vice president of the Internet Design & Service group, which Synopsys formalized in a reorganization last month, said that Synopsys has been working on this initiative for more than a year. Avant! stepped in last fall, hence its products will be added to the offering in the third quarter, while Synopsys' are available now.

DesignSphere is linked directly to TSMC's eFoundry service, a component of which is the IC layout viewing capability of CreoSys, a start-up based in Fremont alongside Avant!. CreoSys launched its tools and announced a customization collaboration with TSMC on April 24. Interestingly, Avant! has formed Avant! West, a subsidiary based in Taiwan headed by Paul Lo.

As for DesignSphere, it will have a bit of outsourcing of its own, as Exodus Communications Inc. of Santa Clara is running the servers behind it. Milligan and Noel Strader, corporate product management at Avant!, said Exodus has dedicated resources for DesignSphere.

Both Strader and Milligan said they expected more partners for DesignSphere Access to be ready by DAC's opening day today in Los Angeles.

"This is the beginning of a new era in silicon design and EDA," de Geus said. "The Internet has created a tremendous opportunity to increase the value that EDA companies can provide the design community."

Through a special agreement, TSMC is linking its Multi-Project Wafer (MPW) service to customers of DesignSphere Access through the eFoundry initiative. MPW is a new TSMC program in which multiple designs can go on one wafer, allowing customers to minimize nonrecurring engineering costs.

The interest in Net-based design for TSMC customers goes all the way to the top at the Hsinchu-based foundry.