EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – Avishtech

By Kella Knack, Senior Director of Strategic Marketing, Avishtech

Kella Knack

2023: The Year of Refining the Role of EDA Toolsets

One year ago, as an industry as well as a country and world, we were dealing with the remnants of COVID-19 and its resultant effects on business. Those efforts centered on a variety of global issues—fabrication facilities having limited manufacturing staffs and production capabilities; “rolling” shut downs of various facilities; materials shortages; shipping capabilities and cost, and most impactful, the global chip shortage.

The “Sort of” Cloudy Crystal Ball for ‘23

As we move towards the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, we are still challenged by on-going global chip shortages. And, there are also two more significant wrinkles:

• The war in the Ukraine (which has significantly reduced our arsenal of support equipment).
• The ongoing/growing concern about China’s potential takeover of Taiwan that could compromise our access to crucial electronic manufacturing facilities.

There are some silver linings resulting from the foregoing: new defense contracts the likes of which we have not seen in a long time and U.S.-based chip manufacturing operations that will help to address the global chip shortage and relieve our strong dependency on Taiwanese manufacturing operations.

When we get to the PCB EDA portion of the market sector occupied by various solution providers (hardware as well as software), the challenges may seem “softer” compared to the “bigger problems.” But, the reality is that PCB EDA suppliers and their products are extremely crucial to the entire product development process. The suppliers that will be the most successful are those that closely adhere to the long-standing approach and principles of product design followed by the semiconductor companies. Here, the emphasis is on being able to accurately simulate and predict performance and reliability early on in the development process.

When it comes to PCBs, this translates to predicting performance and reliability specifically at the PCB design stack-up stage. The imperative is that the PCB designed will be the one that is optimized for predictability, reliability, manufacturability and overall product life expectancy. It’s also the one that doesn’t require often error-prone, time-intense and costly respins. Additionally, truly optimized PCB design toolsets will be those that fit into and augment the MBSE (model-based system engineering) design methodology that continues to grow as the mainstay of development environments. PCB toolset suppliers that will be the most successful as part of this methodology are those that refine their toolsets and their interfaces to the other solutions existent in the MBSE environment as well as the methodology itself. The divisions between PCB design, chip design and successful product realization are rapidly thinning and, ultimately, should be invisible.

Whatever the challenges, when it comes to the electronics industry, the role of PCB EDA toolsets continues to grow with a specific eye to optimizing the design process, and, most importantly removing the “gotchas” that can make or break/brake the product development process.

About Author

Kella Knack currently serves as Senior Director of Strategic Marketing for Avishtech, a leading provider of the EDA software design tools–Gauss Stack and Gauss 2D as well as Avishtech’s Materials Lab and Consulting Services. The company was founded on the principle of using a multidisciplinary approach to develop the materials-driven technologies of the future. The development of its software as well as its lab testing and consulting services embodies the company’s long-standing allegiance to rigorous and thorough research and development, coupled with its core goal of achieving the highest levels of performance and reliability prior to committing a design to hardware. In her current position, Knack

assists in the company’s marketing communications, positioning, tradeshow, PR and outbound messaging efforts.

Prior to this, she served as Vice President of Marketing for Speeding Edge. Previously, she was the Founder and President of KJ Communications, Inc., a marketing consulting and public relations company based in Silicon Valley where she served as a strategic adviser for a number of highly successful marketing campaigns for clients that ranged from start-ups to multimillion dollar companies in the EDA, networking, SOC IP, semiconductor, embedded system design and database management market sectors. Before this, she was an editor of various industry technology publications including PCB Design, LAN Computing and ASIC and EDA Magazine.

Category: EDA Predictions

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 31st, 2023 at 4:08 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.