"What I learned in 20 years of serving the Analog IC design market"

                        by John Tanner
                        President and CEO
                        Tanner EDA

On June 1, 2008, my company, Tanner EDA, achieved a significant milestone:
20 years of delivering analog and mixed-signal CAD tools to a worldwide
community of IC and MEMS designers.  In an industry known for relentless
mergers and acquisitions and continuous financial losses, the long-term
prosperity of a privately held EDA company is no small achievement.

Perhaps the lessons I have learned will be of interest to others.

  1. Analog designs and designers are unique - analog designers know
     their business much better than anyone else.

Analog designs are unique in two regards: they are often specialized to
a particular purpose or specification, and they are often optimized for
maximum performance.  Of course, designing a circuit that could work is
a far cry from designing one that does work, so experienced designers
have, over time, developed individualized design methodologies that suit
their requirements, and permit them to construct manufacturable circuits.

A successful design tool must assist the designer in transferring this
know-how to the final product; it must not "get in the way" of the
designer.  Too many attempts at "analog synthesis" have failed.

While there will no doubt be improvements in future design aids, there
will also be exotic new technologies that will be exploited in innovative
and unpredictable ways.  The most creative designs will lead to disruptive
technology shifts that will impact our everyday lives; good examples of
these are the now-ubiquitous CMOS imager and the becoming-ubiquitous MEMS
sensors (especially orientation and pressure); Tanner EDA tools were
instrumental in the development of many such efforts, ranging from the
exotic (imagers in the Mars rovers) to the prosaic (tire pressure sensors
for handheld and rim-mounted gauges).

  2. A customer is hard to gain, easy to lose - EDA as a service industry.

An integrated circuit design effort is an expensive, long-term proposition.
Partnering with a reliable, stable, responsive tool vendor is essential to
risk mitigation.  It's remarkable that the EDA industry competes with the
airline industry for the bottom rankings in customer satisfaction metrics!

Customer-unfriendly business practices such as poor support, artificial
license restrictions, and vendor lock-in via encrypted libraries have led
to a love-hate relationship between many vendors and their customers.

  3. The world is small - not flat!

It's common today for management, marketing, engineering, manufacturing,
and packaging teams to be separated by eight time zones each.  Often,
multiple engineering teams collaborate on the same development effort,
managing to accelerate development by essentially working around the
clock.  It's essential for an EDA vendor to work flexibly with sales and
licensing, accessible and responsive support, and even the localization of
their software user interfaces.

  4. All customers focus on tool capability, yet other factors are also
     important: ease of use, ease of ownership, and peace of mind.

It is easy to evaluate tools on the basis of feature checklists; it is much
more difficult to evaluate long-term issues such as tool reliability and
robustness, vendor post-sales support, user productivity, and vendor long
-term stability.  For example, will the tool you buy today get acquired by
a competitor tomorrow and be discontinued?  Will the vendor support the
tool, and improve it?  Will the vendor want to speak to the user after the
sale is complete?  All of these questions will determine the outcome of
the IC development effort.

  5. A company's values shine through

It's perhaps a tired chestnut of business management that companies develop
a specific corporate culture which reflects the values and priorities of
their management team.  It is less well understood that a company will
likely treat its customers in a similar manner.

In these days of global financial uncertainty, management scandals ranging
from Enron to Satyam have destroyed shareholder, customer and employee value
simultaneously.  There is no shortcut to business success: it is the
consequence of long periods of very hard work.  The best metric to evaluate
the likelihood of a successful long-term relationship with a vendor is to
assess the vendor's long-term relationship with its staff: high turnover,
frequent reorganizations, and lack of team mentality are red flags.

A key lesson is companies that invest in their future, focus on customer
service, are responsive to customer needs, and treat their customers fairly
and respectfully will succeed.


    This article was originally published in the Feb 2009 DACeZine