Customized EDA tools: New business model for EDA

摘要

Current commercial EDA vendors comprise a mix of a large number of small to midsized point tool providers and a small number of large full RTL to GDSII (and beyond) tool suite providers. While these vendors differ in the scope of solutions they provide, they follow the classical product centric approach of developing once and offering the same solution to various customers. This approach involves identifying a common set of requirements for a mainstream set of targeted users, and then developing a tool with features that best matches those requirements. This makes economical sense for both the EDA vendors and their customers if the tool requirements are mostly uniform and available to EDA vendors. It leads to an efficient distribution of expensive EDA R&D investment over multiple customers, bringing down the cost for everybody.