3rd Party EDA
Tools from Other Sources

Why would you spend tens of thousands of dollars on commercial electronic design automation (EDA) tools for your design team when they can get a decent suite of tools almost for free from their FPGA vendor? This question is probably asked daily in design teams around the world. As you might expect, it also comes up every now and then in the strategic planning rooms at EDA companies. The EDA company version of the question has a slight twist, however: “Should we invest millions to develop FPGA tools if FPGA vendors may be giving away similar tools almost for free before we have a chance to recover our development costs?” For many EDA companies, the answer is a resounding “no.”

A few, however, don’t like the implications of that answer. Around the world, electronics companies are shifting development investments away from ASIC technologies to alternatives such as FPGA and structured ASIC. As the money moves away from ASIC, the traditional ASIC-based EDA ecosystem is shrinking. With the other EDA segments relatively flat, the EDA industry needs to find a new market for growth over the next decade. Despite the apparent iron grip of the FPGA vendors, many in EDA feel that FPGA and structured ASIC are the two areas most likely to experience explosive growth in design tools.

If FPGA is the most likely high-growth tool market and is already dominated by the FPGA vendors themselves, where does commercial EDA stake its claim? How do companies trying to make their living from tool revenue alone compete with FPGA vendors who can afford to give tools away almost for free in order to lock in lucrative silicon sales? Obviously commercial EDA has to find a way to justify the additional cost of their tools when compared with the silicon-subsidized alternatives. [more]