Building for standards: Will EDA vendors meet the challenge?

Electronic News, Nov 2, 1992 by Alain J. Hanover

The time is past. The day is gone. Gone is the era when electronic design automation (EDA) vendors can sit back and play a passive, watchful role in the development and implementation of standards. We must begin to implement standards as they are developed, not after they are ratified.

Historically, the EDA industry has been reactive, not proactive, in its implementation of standards. We have waited for the IEEE, the DoD or even the hardware platform vendors to decree a standard and then we have slowly, painfully adopted them, and then only at the insistence of our customer base.

The reason for this has been simple: EDA vendors have been shortsighted, selfish and self deluding. It has always been in the interest of the EDA vendor to have a proprietary system for everything from windowing systems to databases.

By keeping as much of the system as possible proprietary, EDA vendors gain account control and make it painful for their customers-their most valuable resource-to bring in new technology developed in-house, and to integrate technology from other vendors or from other design disciplines.

Common sense would dictate that this is not the way customers should be treated, and as the industry matures, standards such as EDIF and VHDL emerge in spite of resistance from EDA vendors.

Vendors have reluctantly created weak interfaces and shells around their existing, proprietary tools that charge the user a performance penalty and make utilization of the standards a painful issue rather than a natural process.

Over the past two years a new set of standards has been emerging through the efforts of the CAD Framework Initiative (CFI). CFI has had EDA vendor participation since its inception and gave vendors the chance to work with EDA users to craft a standard that is beneficial to both tool suppliers and tool users. The promise and potential of this effort was and remains immense.

But some vendors seem reluctant, almost recalcitrant, about striving to fulfill this promise. Almost without exception the EDA vendors have adopted a wait-and-see attitude toward the standards being proposed by CFI. This serves only one purpose: To allow these vendors to maintain proprietary design environments that are friendly only to tools they sell. In effect, it gives them monopoly control over the users' (their customers) design process.

The emerging CFI 1.0 framework specification is already languishing for real support. For almost a year a proposed specification has been in existence; it is currently being tested for ratification this year.

Already the EDA vendors are paying their standard lip service to the standard saying they will support it when it is ratified and the customers have indicated what they want.

At the same time, the industry's two largest vendors, Mentor and Cadence, have introduced their own frameworks that do not incorporate the CFI specification. Their answer has been, "We will make it complaint when the standard is ratified." The question I have is, "Why wait?"

Since the very existence of CFI proclaims that EDA users are demanding framework standards, why wait yet longer to begin implementing these standards?

The user is not asking EDA vendors to wait, so the reasons must serve the needs and interest of the EDA vendors. They want to maintain a strangle hold on their customers and keep competing tools and technologies out of the fortresses they have created in their installed base.

Vendors who act this way are missing the boat, because longterm success is borne of openness. For instance, Viewlogic-which focuses on just one set of design problems and therefore typically shares its customers' design environments with other tools-has always embraced standards. This enables our customers to easily integrate a wide range of technology.

Vendors should support emerging as well as established standards, as Viewlogic has done with the emerging CFI standard that we support with ViewFrame, part of our new Powerview design environment. We did the same with EDIF and VHDL and have not suffered for it.

In fact, Viewlogic has enjoyed one of the healthiest growth rates in the EDA industry for the last five years.

The long-term winners in the EDA industry will be those companies that allow the broadest, easiest, least painful access to the full range of EDA technology users need to develop the next generation of electronic products.

EDA vendors should help, not hinder, that evolution by building software toward the industry's emerging standards, as well as by incorporating the ratified and de-factor ones.

When it comes to implementing standards, many vendors wait and see. Instead they should make it be. There's no excuse not to.