Panel: The Key to EDA Results: Component & Library Management

In the last twelve years the EDA industry has grown from infancy to annual revenues of over $2 billion. Yet the industry has fallen short of its potential to dramatically reduce time-to-market, product cost, and development cost. End-users now believe that much of this shortfall is related to the inability of EDA frameworks and tools to enable important design practices such as parts standardization, re-use of component and library knowledge, and the enterprise-wide management and sharing of component information and EDA libraries in support of concurrent engineering. Sixty to eighty percent of the cost of an electronic product or system is determined by the choice of the electronic components used in it. These components are usually selected in the first few weeks of the design cycle, often based on incomplete information. Product cost and time-to-market can be reduced significantly if design engineers have immediate, desktop access to a Component and Library Management System (CLMS) that provides them with complete, consistent, and up-to-date information on their preferred components and vendors (including their own cost, quality, and process information), as well as fingertip access to a large reference data-base of all electronic components that are important to them. CLMS enables selection of the best components. Correspondingly, the cost and time associated with creating, managing, and sharing EDA libraries for each new design significantly increases overall development cost and cycle time. A CLMS can largely eliminate this problem by providing software tools for the rapid generation and management of complete, consistent, and correlated libraries that support the multiple CAE/CAD tools of multiple vendors throughout the system-level design process, from schematic capture through simulation to PCB layout. While end-users agree that there is an urgent need for a CLMS that is an integrated, neutral, and common solution to their diverse component information and library problems, many issues remain: - Should the EDA-neutral CLMS of choice be provided by each different EDA tools provider, by an independent third-party CLMS provider, or be developed internally by each end user? - What is the role of re-usable EDA-neutral enterprise-wide libraries vs. separat- e libraries for each set of EDA tools, for each department or project? - What are the system requirements for a CLMS to maximize its benefits to end-users? - What is the right pricing model for the CLMS? For a reference component database? For standard, off-the-shelf EDA libraries? - Should the component data and libraries be provided by semiconductor companies, EDA providers, or third parties?