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"Functionality is the key."

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DQI Bureau
New Update

—Dr CHI-FOON CHAN,

COO, Synopses.

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width="183" height="261">Dr Chi-Foon Chan, Chief Operating Officer of Synopses, is

assigned to look after the company's internal operations and customer satisfaction.

Taiwan-born Dr Chan joined Synopses in 1990 after holding important positions in NEC and

Intel. An MS and PhD in computer engineering from Case Western Reserve University, Dr Chan

had maximum realization of his academics on Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry.

An industry that enables automation of the semiconductor design. Let's find out what Dr

Chan has to share with DATAQUEST on his experiences in the EDA market.

What sort of solutions do you

offer?




I think there are two challenges. One main challenge is productivity. As the complexity of
electronic systems gets bigger and bigger, you need equally more and more complex chips.

And yet the time cycle is not getting longer. For example, if you consider digital

cameras, they operate on a life-cycle of a few months. So productivity is actually the key

driver.

The second issue is of complexity. There is

no way to do it manually. We are packing more and more function into the chip when the

design is getting lesser than the tenth of a micron. The physics of electron tunneling

also gets into play. So you have to wrestle with physics while you worry about wireless

phones etc. So the design tools allow you to work at the level of complexity that ensures

that your design can get down to the details.

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As an analogy, you can look at an architect

designing a 100-storey building without worrying about every brick that goes on the

kitchen sink.

DA is said to be an 'enabling

technology'. Why is this so?




I was just telling you about the digital camera. The amount of technology that goes into
products like a digital camera or a wireless telephone is tremendous. The number of

variations are many. Without proper automation tools, if everybody had to recreate the

design again and again, you see, it's like building a 100 storey skyscraper to re-draw all

the blue prints for every small change. You would never be able to come up with a final

blue print. Also, you will have to verify that this 100 storey building better stand

before you build it. Also, after you draw the blueprints, you have to be sure that if you

had some major or minor change you can react fast. That's why EDA tools are the enabling

technology, because, without these tools, first you won't even have the productivity, and

secondly you won't be able to work on your design. Thirdly, you don't have the flexibility

to react to customer needs. We live in an age where the first person to get to the market

has a major advantage; but that advantage is an advantage only if you can react to the

customer's needs. If you get to the market first and the market says "this is great,

but this is what I want", then the second guy actually wins because you take so long

to adapt to the reality, and you have gained nothing. So as the consumer world gets more

competitive, the ability to respond rapidly to the customer becomes more important. And

that's why I think that EDA is a major enabling technology.

Tell us about some breakthroughs in

the EDA industry?




I can give you a one-minute summary of what happened in the EDA industry during the last
30 years. In the seventies, engineers were designing in polygons because designing a chip

is really a photographic process. So engineers really had to draw or photo-build the

'negative'. In the eighties, they used gates as the building blocks for designing chips.

In the nineties engineers use languages to design chips.

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One of the new breakthroughs is the

presence of a whole new verification paradigm, which involves much higher performance than

our traditional simulation tools. We have recently announced formal verification tools. We

are talking about a different methodology of verification of many levels of chip design. I

think that design technology follows a path of evolution as opposed to a revolutionary

one. So you won't see people changing radically tomorrow. Rather, tomorrow you will see

very creative tools coming out, and they will get slowly absorbed, and the methodology

will slowly change.

Can you tell us which direction EDA

is heading in?




To us, this is fairly clear. Where we are today is a short run from managing the paradox
of a system on a chip. When I say system on a chip, you are putting many building blocks

on a single chip. design because there are many complexities and in the other because of the problem of the

complexities you cannot go to a higher level>.

When there are many complex problems in

front of you, there are two ways to solve the problem. One is to go to a higher level of

abstraction-if you are going to build a 100 storey building, you can't think of every

brick that you are going to use but every storey, or every room. In other words, you go to

a higher level of abstraction. The second thing is you do reuse. So you know which part of

the building you are going to reuse and you just reproduce it. That is one way to handle

complexity, a very common engineering way of doing it. The paradox is, we are doing a

system on a chip and we are putting millions of gates on a chip, so there is also physics

to contend with. Issues like electron tunnelling, reliability etc. are important here. So

you have to manage the details, and managing complexity and managing details are almost

opposite ends of a paradox. We want to ensure that from the high level you can safely

guarantee reliability. That's one area we are working on.

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Buggy chips are not uncommon these

days. What sort of testing procedures and practices are used in the indus-try today?
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There are many new and innovative tools coming on board, like simulation tools and
verification tools. It's really a matter of coverage, how many times you can go through

the design, and how many angles of testing you can cover? If the tools are faster, you can

do more testing. So that is one direction. At some point, the design is so complex that

appropriate coverage cannot be given, because one cannot spend months simulating the

design. It is here that formal testing methods are useful, where one isolates timing and

functionality. I believe that this will be a major area.

Your corporate history is rich in

the area of mergers and acquisitions. Is this typical of the EDA industry?
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Mergers and acquisitions are typical of our industry basically for two reasons. First, in
our industry, to make any kind of sustainable progress, you have to be in one of the top

three positions. The number one company makes a good amount of money, the number two makes

some money, and number three breaks even. It's not an industry where you can find 500

people making money at the same time. Basically, here, synergies are the issue.

With so much automation in design,

what is left for the human mind to do?
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That's a good question. You know, to answer that question you have to separate the human
beings into different segments. The bulk of human beings are actually in the high level

design. But you still need human beings at every stage of the process, it is only that you

need less of them. It's almost like division of labor. For example, before you may have

needed 500 people to build a house; today, you may only need 20, but you still need one

guy to see the lumber, and do stuff like that. But the bulk of the engineering team will

think at a higher level, and at their level they are worrying about the architectural

constraints, verification, functionality, power consumption, speed etc.

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