Interview with Simon Butler, CEO of Methodics at DVCon 2019

Sanjay Gangal interviewed Simon Butler, CEO of Methodics. at the 2019 DVCon.

SG: Simon, Methodics has been around for 12 years. Tell us, what got you started?

SB: Well, we started with some data management tools around the Cadence and Synopsys platform, and we spun into a kind of an IP management methodology, IP management tools, and now we basically sell ecosystems and platforms for managing bills of materials and the IP ecosystem across large companies.

SG: I just saw your press release that you had five years of record growth. Tell us what started that and what is keeping it up?

SB: I think what's happened is that there's been a lot of consolidation in the market, people are moving to more of an IP-centric flow, and we had that IP methodology in place five, six years ago, and people have started catching up. So kind of right place, right time. We have some big customers now. There's a lot of credibility around our platform. So it's really the IP management platform that's been driving growth.

SG: You're not really an EDA company, right? Or at least you claim you are not an EDA company.

SB: Yeah, we started off as an EDA company, but if you look at the makeup of our team now, we have people from Yahoo, VMware, a lot of enterprise software companies, and the reason for that really is that we're kind of part of the fabric of the IT infrastructure at this point. So it's really less of an EDA issue, but just a question of scale, and ability to manage multiple remote sites, lots of data. So it becomes more of an IT kind of scaling issue in some ways. So, yeah.

SG: And we are here at DVCon, everybody else is verification.

SB: Right.

SG: Are you guys verification too?

SB: Actually we're not, no. So the main thrust of our platform for the last couple of years has been around traceability. So if you manage, if you track every IP and every bill of materials across every project in the company, and it gives you some insight as to which IPs are being used where, what the quality was when they were taped out, we gather all that information. The tie-in to the air verification flow is that we also track which regressions were run, which ones passed and failed, and we can try and help with the compliance of all these IPs for ISO 26262 Automotive Safety flows. So all of that is a question of managing the record, managing the metadata as they come back, the results that come back from regressions, and applying that to the general makeup of the IP version that you have to use in a project.

SG: What trends do you see in the industry this year?

SB: There's a lot of focus on automotive, of course. There's a lot of focus on, what we've seen, a lot of scale and really being able to almost use a PLM-like flow, but targeted at the semiconductor space. There's been a lot of interest around the flow. We know that some of the big PLM companies are trying to penetrate the semiconductor market. Thankfully, we have a great flow that's targeted at the semiconductor space, and we do really well in those kind of evals against PLM tools.

SG: I'm assuming you're talking about Dassault Systèmes and Siemens.

SB: Yes. We've.. Some of them are friends, some of them we've competed against in accounts. We prefer to build relationships with those companies, especially people like Dassault, and Siemens, Oracle. We have a great complementary flow that lets them focus on the manufacturing side, and lets us manage the engineering bills of materials.

SG: What do you see for Methodics in the rest of 2019?

SB: We're gonna continue to build out these automotive flows. I think we bring a lot of value to the functional safety managers, a lot of traceability that wasn't there before, managing these disparate systems, these varying, various sources of metadata that needs to be tracked. We can bring all that together in one single source of truth, and then use that to deliver files, the right files, to designer work spaces.

SG: Are there particular segments of semiconductor design area where you shine more than other areas?

SB: We have a solution for most pieces. We have a client for the analog-mixed-signal data, we call that VersIC. It's that plugs into the Synopsys, Laker Custom Compiler tools, and of course the Cadence Virtuoso Platform. The analog-mixed-signal guys have a great client there. And then we have a really nice flow for the digital designers who are actually running their regressions and managing their Verilog and VHDL. And then the actual integration folks that are building the chips are managing the life cycle of the IPs and tracking which kind of materials they should be using. What a good solution for them as well. So it's a kind of an end-to-end solution that we provide.

SG: The industry keeps coming out with new standards. So, do these standards affect how your products are developed and used?

SB: Definitely. So as we know, the automotive community is very focused on the ISO 26262. There's also some standards that are important to the military, to the Air Force, to some of the aviation companies that we deal with. So if you wanna sell, if you wanna be a supplier into these kind of industries, then you have to design things in a certain way that ensures they're safe and compliant. And we have a whole platform that's based around that to deliver and manage that compliance across the SOC.

SG: And what is the best way for people to find out more about Methodics on the internet?

SB: The best way is to go to our website methodics.com. And yeah, that would be it.

Tags: IP, ISO 26262, Methodics, SOC

Category: Video Roundup

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