Great Designs Coming Out of India

EDA product development in India has come a long way since the late 1980’s when EDA companies such as Cadence Design Systems established operations in the country. Mirroring semiconductor companies, initially EDA R&D centers in India were working on blocks of larger designs; with time Indian R&D centers have moved up the value chain and proven their capabilities in the global arena. As a result, not only are several product lines being steered out of India in the EDA sphere, but product innovation is also happening, driven by the desire of Indian teams to create value for business impact.

Cadence was an early entrant into the Indian market and has been present here since 1988. Over the years the India R&D center has grown to be the biggest outside the US and is now driving several products out of India, two of which are described in this article.

What it takes to deliver leading-edge products from India
Before going into specific products, let us look at the confluence of factors that are needed for R&D centers to drive product innovation from India. There are several factors, three of which are discussed below.

First is the imperative to build up the technical capability and domain expertise of the engineering teams. This is a long-term process, taking at least 10 years in the case of EDA, and requires continuous effort, especially because of the number of fresh engineers entering into the work force that need to build up expertise. The kind of work that is now being done in India is testament to the proficiency that Indian engineers have now attained.

Secondly, there is the opportunity to partner with “teaching customers” who are doing leading edge work. This is important for two reasons. One reason is that these are customers that are likely to face next-generation challenges and who will need the latest technologies that can help them meet those challenges. IDCs of MNC’s are increasingly taking on end-to-end design work in India and working on leading edge design. When customers discuss their challenges with bleeding-edge designs, EDA vendors are presented with the chance to identify technical problems that could become business opportunities, i.e., one that several customers will encounter and that the EDA company can monetize. We as EDA vendors need to be ready to meet this customer challenge and also be able to identify the big technology trends of tomorrow for which cutting edge technology will be required.

The other reason why partnering with customers is important is that it gives EDA companies the opportunity to collaborate with the customer as the product is being developed. Cadence, for example, has forged a strong relationship with such customers over the past 20 years, and we have been able to leverage these “learning” partnerships while developing cutting edge technologies such as the Incisive Enterprise Verifier product that is mentioned below.

Lastly, it has to do with the mindset, maturity, and confidence for the teams to take risk. This happens over a period of time, as the teams deliver on larger and more complicated projects.

From Cadence India R&D
At the start of the decade, two of the teams at Cadence India were ready in terms of the three factors mentioned above to take on product development that had global impact. The first was the Allegro PCB & IC Packaging Design team and the second was the Incisive Verification team.

Allegro PBC & IC Packaging Design Platform
In the early part of the decade, the Allegro PCB & IC Packaging Design team was already working on several different technologies in Allegro physical layout and front end. The team felt that it was ready to leverage the talent and expertise it had gained to create value that had a business impact. The team decided to focus on Allegro front end and analog simulation technologies for PCB design.

Two products with global impact that are being owned out of India are the Allegro System Architect and Allegro RF SiP (System In Package) Architect. Allegro System Architect can be called a disruptive technology, in that it offers a new way of capturing the schematic of the design through a spreadsheet editor. In addition, it also offers multiple input mechanisms, through traditional schematics and HDL. The advantages of the spreadsheet editor feature come to the forefront in designs involving large pin-count devices, multiple wide buses, FPGAs, and high pin-count differential connectors. The innovative spreadsheets provide faster input and include extensive sort, filter, and editing capabilities. The spreadsheet editor function can save significant time, especially in big designs, as design entry for such large designs tends to be cumbersome.

The Allegro System Architect is a truly innovative product because it aims to provide an original solution to a tedious, time consuming task. It is a product with global impact, architected and delivered by Indian engineers.

Another product driven is the Allegro RF SiP Architect. With mixed-signal applications becoming increasingly common in hand-held devices, and while mixed-signal applications drive SiP design, RF integration complicates performance. Allegro RF SiP Architect delivers a single schematic and simulation solution for RF/analog ICs and complex IC package substrates, and supports package substrate-level passive structures based on Pcell technology.

Currently the Allegro R&D team in India owns five products that are being used by customers worldwide.

Incisive Verification Platform
Cadence India’s Incisive team has been working on formal verification and simulation products for many years. The traditional way to do verification is simulation. However, simulation has the inherent limitation that one can simulate only a limited set of vectors in any reasonable amount of time. Formal verification is a relatively new technique that can perform exhaustive verification without the need for test vectors. The Incisive team in Cadence Noida started looking at the area of formal verification in 2002. The result of this work was that Cadence launched the Incisive Formal Verifier (IFV) product in 2005. This was the first product that was defined, developed and owned by the Cadence Noida center.

The Incisive Formal Verifier (IFV) was well-accepted in the market as a reliable technology, but the disadvantage of formal analysis is that it can only be used on a limited class of control oriented designs. Moreover, formal analysis has capacity limitations and can only be used on small to mid-sized block level designs. Simulation technologies have the advantage of being scalable, but may not provide full coverage, can be time consuming, and is dependent on the quality of the testbench.

In today’s highly competitive environment, first silicon success is crucial and anecdotal evidence suggests that 60% of failures occur due to errors not caught at the verification stage. Therefore, the need of the hour is a reliable verification technology which is exhaustive on large designs. The R&D team at Cadence India that was working on formal and simulation technologies felt that a hybrid solution which combined the best of both was required, and with that in mind Incisive Enterprise Verifier (IEV) was born. Incisive Enterprise Verifier delivers dual power from tightly integrated formal analysis and simulation engines. It includes Incisive Formal Verifier and Incisive Enterprise Simulator capabilities and adds new engine integration capability.

Incisive Enterprise Verifier is the result of more than three years of experimentation with different ways to combine simulation with formal analysis and validation of these techniques both internally and externally with leading customers. IEV contains many innovations that are unique in this market. The IEV team is currently in the process of filing two patents on this technology with the US patent office.

The innovative features in this product provide clear benefits to Cadence’s formal customers, by enabling designers and verification engineers to perform extensive early verification using both formal verification and simulation techniques on a design before the testbench is available. They also extend the value of formal techniques by finding design bugs, achieving verification proofs and hitting coverage points in designs that are too large to handle by the original IFV product.

Summary
Product ownership and innovation is a journey, especially for R&D centres that are doing work for their parent companies outside of company headquarters. There are various factors that need to come together for great product development to happen. On the one hand, teams have to build their expertise by investing in close customer engagements and consistently demonstrating value, which establishes their credibility. On the other, there has to be a customer pain point that gives the teams an opportunity to rise to the challenge. In addition, the maturity of the ecosystem is crucial since innovation cannot happen in a vacuum.

The rewards of this diligence and patience are well worth the time and effort that it takes – there is no greater reward for R&D teams than to drive cutting-edge innovation.