EDAC Expands Its Scope but Misses an Opportunity

I expect that the activities of the EDA Consortium (EDAC), our industry’s main trade organization, are followed more closely by EDA vendors than users. However, some of you may have seen the recent publicity surrounding the organization’s name change to the Electronic System Design Alliance (ESDA). I applaud this move because it reflects the gradual but ongoing merger of EDA and embedded systems, a topic that we have covered here on The Breker Trekker in the past.

However, I do have two reservations about the specifics of the name change. First, as some people have pointed out, “ESD” is strongly associated with “electrostatic discharge” for us engineers who have worked on actual lab benches and not just in the world of abstract EDA models. But that’s a minor quibble as far as I’m concerned. My bigger issue is that EDAC did not use the name change as a chance to expand from “design” to “development” in its description of scope. Please continue reading as I expand a bit on all three of these points.

We have noted before that the traditional EDA world of hardware design is transforming to systems involving both hardware and software. One of the consequences is that the role of verification engineers involves more embedded software all the time. We’ve also noted that Breker, as The SoC Verification Company, lives right on the interface between the EDA and embedded worlds. Our current users come from both camps, and we expect to pull in even more programmers over time.

So it is natural for EDAC to expand its coverage to include more software and more embedded systems. This is entirely in line with other trends in the industry, such as Embedded TechCon co-locating with the Design Automation Conference (DAC). EDAC (and the EDA industry) has shown flexibility before when encompassing  semiconductor IP vendors more than a decade ago. A name change also acknowledges this aspect of an expanded role.

Perhaps the strongest argument for a re-boot of EDAC is the limited size of EDA as originally defined. Overall revenue has generally continued to grow, albeit modestly, but the number of EDA vendors has shrunk dramatically from the peaks during the 28 years that EDAC has existed. This is partly due to consolidation in a mature industry, but also due to the fact that the semiconductor market, our primary customers, is also going through a major consolidation.

EDA vendors are looking to expand into products targeted at programmers, a much larger potential pool of customers than historical EDA users, so EDAC should evolve to reflect this. Finally, as new EDAC/ESDA Executive Director Bob Smith notes, there are advanced packaging technologies that also fall outside of traditional EDA boundaries. So, for all of these reasons, a name change and expanded mission make sense. Bob will be great leader for the revitalized organization, and he threw a really nice launch party two weeks ago.

So why do I have reservations? When I first heard the new name, I immediately noticed the acronym overlap with electrostatic discharge but didn’t see it as a big deal. I do have to note, however, that the EOS/ESD Association already has the ESDA URL. So while mission confusion is unlikely, I’ll bet that I will find myself going to the wrong Web site more than once.

My real issue is my long-standing argument that “design” is not inclusive enough to describe the development of a complex electronic product. I first proposed more than three years ago that EDA be redefined as “electronic development automation” and that DAC be dubbed the “Development Automation Conference.” Most of Breker’s users are verification and validation engineers, and they do not consider themselves “designers” or their job to “design.” The same can be said for product engineers, system architects, programmers, test engineers, and others vital to electronic product development.

I also made this argument in one of my earliest blog posts for Breker. Since the industry didn’t exactly rise up in support I guess this is just a quixotic campaign on my part. But I can’t help wishing that EDAC had renamed itself the “Electronic System Development Alliance” as a first step toward acknowledging that the expanded scope of the organization and the EDA industry now includes even more people beyond hardware designers. I welcome your thoughts on this topic.

Tom A.

The truth is out there … sometimes it’s in a blog.

Tags: Bob Smith, Breker, dac, Design Automation Conference, EDA, EDA Consortium, EDAC, embedded systems, ESD Alliance, ESDA, functional verification, graph, graph-based, hardware, IoT, portable stimulus, scenario model, simulation, SoC verification, software

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