We're coming out of an electronic ‘gold-rush' era. Fuelled by lots of venture capital and speculation, it's been one based on getting to market as quickly as possible to cash in on the high-growth markets like wireless and portable digital devices. With these wheels now grinding to a halt, there's a mad scramble in turbulent market conditions that no one was expecting. Let alone were ready for.
High-end EDA vendors who claimed they could provide tools that were crucial for design flow have been charging prices that often exceeded the costs of design engineers. These vendors are likely to find themselves doing a lot of backpedalling on their previous market position.
The cost of these traditional point tools has been both prohibitive and limiting instead of contributing more to real long-term growth for the electronics design industry. Intentionally designed to force designers down a certain path, binding them forever to using their products, their real positions have been about anything but reducing design costs and promoting innovation.
It's a good time to assess the high and hidden costs of continuing with the approach.
Many companies are discovering that business decisions based on such design flows come at a high price. Forced to reevaluate whether it makes sense to continue with status quo and risk being stuck on platforms that can't be updated, the option of considering a more affordable solution with ever increasing capabilities makes more sense than ever before.
In addition to high costs upfront, there are also long-term costs buried in support and services. What's really required is a community focus of continuous education for future innovation and development, so that engineers can stay current and relevant into the future. It's less about providing an online command reference and more about helping businesses upskill their engineers in a way that helps feed back into future technology leadership.
It's not enough any more to rely on bringing products to market faster and managing design complexity. Programmable intelligence or ‘soft' design is what's really responsible for a product's value today. It's the true differentiator for gaining market advantage, as opposed to the physical platform that IP sitting on.
Taking the ‘soft' approach has serious advantages over traditional design methods such as more complete design synchronization, easy design reuse and design platform flexibility. Only systems that harness this advantage, without restrictive licensing policies, and provide community support that's designed to enhance an engineer's time are truly qualified to claim ‘lower design costs'.
In the past, the decision to buy an EDA tool may have been based on buying the most expensive tools. But things have changed and suddenly the situation is a lot more complex. It's time to ask the hard questions rather than just sitting and waiting, and hoping.
There are some companies that have consistently provided updated technology to customers so they can keep pace with the changing nature of today's electronics design. Rather than lock customers into inflexible licensing agreements, these companies have maintained long term customer loyalty with affordable prices, ease of use, flexible licensing, superior community support and a growing range of functionality. The companies watch, listen and learn. More adaptable in changing market conditions, they are proving to be the upstarts to the older dinosaurs who can't adapt.
