Spirakis Urges EDA to OpenAccess

Electronic News, July 9, 2001 by Gale Morrison

The Design Technology Council (DTC), the group of power EDA users that banded together about four years ago, significantly upped its profile and stature during the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Las Vegas in June. The group endorsed Cadence Design Systems Inc.'s Genesis design information database and its application programming interface (API) as a standard to be open-sourced via www.openaccess.org so that all EDA tools could write to it and, hopefully, interoperate. Electronic News last week took some time to talk with Greg Spirakis, the newly elected DTC chair and, as such, a strong OpenAccess advocate. Spirakis' day job is director of design technology at Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel Corp.

EN: Is making the Genesis database an open-source standard in EDA your No. 1 priority?

Spirakis: Absolutely. Tool interoperability has been the top priority for the DTC for several years now. We had tried the EDA spine initiative with Cadence and Synopsys, and we had tried various other initiatives. Then about 18 months ago or so, we decided that the direction we needed to go in was toward one consistent database. A number of the member companies--Intel, IBM, Hewlett-Packard--were heading in that direction on their own, and we realized that it was just silly that we were all doing this differently and separately ... We wanted and needed to find a way to achieve an industry standard API, and we looked at a couple of different vendors out there. At that time, Cadence expressed the greatest interest in working with us.

EN: Avant! says its Milky way database is just as open to customers as Cadence's.

Spirakis: I'll say the same thing I said a couple of weeks ago: We welcome any help from Avant! or any other EDA company. But when we were looking at this, Avant! had not expressed any interest in truly opening up their database, and to the best of my knowledge they still have not.

EN: It was kind of amazing to see so many EDA executives at DAC so publicly complaining about doing something their customers want them to do.

Spirakis: Well, I can see why there is legitimate skepticism, given past interoperability efforts. But this is a very user-driven activity. To that extent, even if the vendors are not willing to work among themselves, then they can work with the users. It's not meant to be an exclusive club. Sure it was a limited number of customers at first, because that's the only way to get things started. You can't have 150 people in the very first meeting trying to make all the decisions ... But now, nothing is stopping any other vendor from coming to any other member of the OpenAccess community...

Cadence gets credit though for stepping forward. They have given us commitments that they will open (Genesis) up to users ... certainly it's inconvenient for everybody to work with it now, and ultimately that needs to be fixed. But we have to keep working in good faith. An open-source database used by all is very important down the road.

I think what we have to realize, though, is that in a sense we are only a year into this. I think there is a long way to go. Is it where it needs to be right now? No. Are we moving in a direction that it needs to go? Yes. Are we taking a different approach than those that failed in the past? Yes. Structurally, this is very different. The user community is driving this and already going in this direction ...It behooves the vendors to understand what we are doing.

Eventually, we want all future products to be developed around the API. We are all realists; there is plenty of perfectly good EDA software out there that is not going to get rewritten ... The key is starting to get a nonmoving target in front of everybody. That's what we want to do.

EN: You were explaining that the DTC started as a group of the subset of EDA users who were doing a significant amount of internal CAD tool development, i.e., writing their own tools because what was needed wasn't commercially available. Will the OpenAccess/Genesis effort lead to less internal tool development? Is it meant to do that?

Spirakis: I say OpenAccess is neutral to (lessening internal development). In some sense, it was the result of a flurry of internal CAD tool development in recent years, as we came up against some really tough problems ... In a perfect world, (a standard API and database) makes it much easier to adopt something from the outside, but it also makes it easier to develop something internally. That's why I say it's neutral. It makes it easier for anybody to get the latest technology into the hands of the user.

It does make it easier for external tools to be swapped out, or new tools to be swapped in. With this, EDA vendors can turn over new technology more quickly. What we have (without a common API) is this frustration by everybody because ... the barrier to bringing (a new tool) in is so high that nobody wins.