Over 1000 electronic design engineers in Pune, Hyderabad and Bangalore attending EDA leader Cadence’s “Technology on Tour” seminars in the three cities this month, are sizing up the company’s radical proposition: it’s time to ditch traditional product development practices, kill the sharp divide between hardware and software – and deliver a timely, agile and application-ready masala mix of the two.
Delegates at the Cadence seminars in India were briefed on recent Cadence releases in the three streams of Custom Integrated circuits ( Virtuoso IC 6.1.4), Digital ICs ( Encounter 9) and in PCB and IC packaging ( Cadence Allegro 16.3), with support extending to 32 nanometre and 28 nanometre designs. India-based engineers of Cadence had contributed significantly to all verification software tools and specifically to the PCB tool Allegro, Rahul Arya, Marketing and Technology Sales Director, Cadence Design Systems ( India ) said.


Briefing IndiaTechOnline, on the sidelines of the Bangalore event, Arya outlined the company’s new industry direction --EDA 360 – and suggested how it addresses the growing ‘profitability’ gap that threatens the vitality of the entire industry. Cadence has challenged the semiconductor and EDA communities to adopt an application-driven approach to system design, where hardware is designed and developed to dynamically meet the needs of the application.

Despite huge consumer demand for advanced mobile computing devices and other compelling electronics devices, development practices are choking the innovation, Cadence suggests. In a traditional development approach, hardware is developed first and the operating system (OS) and applications are added later. While the hardware and OS are fully integrated, applications are confined to the underlying hardware/software platforms. This is so ‘yesterday’. Why?
Because electronics companies today, are increasingly being dared by game-changing new players, who derive their differentiation from applications or “apps.” These new entrants now demand that semiconductor providers supply “application-ready” platforms with hardware and software for a given application such as mobile computing.

Addressing this shift in the ecosystem, EDA360 outlines an application-driven development model where hardware is designed and developed to dynamically meet the needs of the application.

In support of this industry vision, Cadence also announced its initial offerings: an expanded technical collaboration and new product family that will enable the adoption of this approach in the design and development of new, innovative electronic devices

These are

• A technical collaboration Cadence and Wind River that aims to integrate the Cadence Incisive Software Extensions and Wind River’s Simics virtual platform.
• The industry’s first fully integrated, high-performance verification computing platform, called Palladium XP, that unifies simulation, acceleration and emulation into a single verification environment.
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The Technology on Tour event will also come to Delhi later this year.


Fuller details of the EDA 360 proposition can be found here: http://www.eda360.com/  

May 23 2010