Windows tipped for EDA standard (Electronics Weekly) [LWN.net]

Electronics Weekly covers comments by John Tanner, CEO of Tanner EDA, on the future of EDA (Electronic Design Automation) applications. "Windows will become the de facto standard operating system for EDA applications, in the same way as the PC has superseded dedicated Unix boxes, and EDA firms currently migrating their software to Linux are running up a blind alley." Thanks to John Rigg.

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Windows tipped for EDA standard (Electronics Weekly)

Posted Jul 8, 2005 18:43 UTC (Fri) by salvarsan (guest, #18257) [Link] (2 responses)

More spin indicative of Electronics Weekly's editorial slant.

Read the last paragraph first.

-salvarsan

Windows tipped for EDA standard (Electronics Weekly)

Posted Jul 10, 2005 4:32 UTC (Sun) by mgh (guest, #5696) [Link] (1 responses)

This is a very intersting case of an article with a headline that is nearly completely contradicted by the body of the article.

Para1: "Tanner said the higher performance of todays PCs versus dedicated Unix boxes is forcing EDA firms to use them, but porting existing code to Windows from Unix is a huge task. Migrating to Linux running on a PC is not so onerous."

Para2: EDA vendors are moving wholesale to Linux as they acknowledge that the dedicated Unix hardware vendors have been bypassed, said Tanner.

Para3: It is a desperation move, as it would be extremely costly for them to port their tools to Windows and they must stay on the highest performance hardware, he said.

There are then a couple of paras that say that Windows has fewer versions. "98/me/2k/xp/2003/longhorn" yeah right.

and then a couple of paras from an "opposing point of view" which say Linux performs better

Interesting.... in fact a highly pro-linux article - despite the headline, anyone understand the logic of this?

Windows tipped for EDA standard (Electronics Weekly)

Posted Jul 10, 2005 9:29 UTC (Sun) by rmstar (guest, #3672) [Link]

It is called corruption. The original article probably had a different title.

Amusing

Posted Jul 8, 2005 18:56 UTC (Fri) by freeio (guest, #9622) [Link] (3 responses)

I distinctly remember some years ago that my friends at Intergraph told me that I needed to transition to NT because that is where the technology was headed. They were working fiercely at the time to rework all of their applications to run on NT. Note how very well Intergraph has done since then...

On the other hand, here at the office we are doing all of our schematic and printed circuit layout work using Eagle (www.cadsoft.de) which runs interchangeably on both linux and windows systems, with no problems whatsoever. From what I understand, Eagle was developed using the Qt graphics tools, and the developers were smart enough to make their code standard enough to compile on both platforms transparently. I see this as the optimal future course for EDA vendors, as there is no reason to be slavishly tied to only one platform or OS.

Yes, I understand that the EDA tool portability can be limited by "legacy" code issues, where databases, formats, and libraries do not always port well across OS environments. Nevertheless, smart vendors will see this as an opportunity for growth rather than an impossible "cost of conversion."

freeio

Amusing

Posted Jul 8, 2005 19:14 UTC (Fri) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm just a hobbyist, but I also use Eagle on Linux. I don't like Eagle that much, but whenever I see someone using a "real" (read: expensive) EDA system on any platform, I am shocked by the incredible badness of it. Current EDA tools are just not that productive, and not much more productive than they were 10 years back. I'd guess that the whole lot of the current EDA vendors will be in trouble if anyone ever decides to go after their business with actual quality software that works.

You might find KiCad interesting

Posted Jul 8, 2005 19:52 UTC (Fri) by boog (subscriber, #30882) [Link]

You might be interested in a newly-released project: KiCad

http://www.lis.inpg.fr/realise_au_lis/kicad/

To my knowledge, it provides the first free end-to-end (schematic->pcb layout->gerber plot) electronics design suite. I'm no expert on the fancy proprietry systems, but I have used Eagle and equivalents. I find KiCad to be perfectly serviceable and have already produced a couple of boards with it. Documentation is French, but translation appears to be on-going.

Amusing

Posted Jul 14, 2005 18:55 UTC (Thu) by macc (guest, #510) [Link]

I've used Eagle and Viewlogic Schematics and Layout.
upto now i use Eagle for the runofthemill stuff.

Eagle is rather easy to start with but hierarchical schematics
labels, annotation, simulation, integration of external tools ...
as Viewlogic does it ( unix heritage ) is completely out of
the question.

I've started looking into GEDA.

Nobodies on windows.

Posted Jul 8, 2005 20:09 UTC (Fri) by Puff65537 (guest, #30883) [Link] (2 responses)

Never heard of Tanner, but my opterons have taped out 100+ chips using Redhat and Cadence software. RHEL has become a tier 1 platform for every vendor I deal with. And windows support is spotty at best.

Nobodies on windows.

Posted Jul 8, 2005 23:45 UTC (Fri) by pgb (guest, #30022) [Link] (1 responses)

Tanner makes the complete piece of low-end **** called L-Edit. At least that's all I have been unfortunate enough to use. I wouldn't trust the guy too much...

Nobodies on windows.

Posted Aug 1, 2005 9:48 UTC (Mon) by TFW (guest, #31430) [Link]

Ask the world's leading Bluetooth IC vendor how good L-Edit is! Or ask Ericsson, who threw $M's at Cadence until they were so badly beat in the market by the new leader that they closed their Bluetooth group, and hey presto, the company using L-Edit have just opened a design centre in Lund.

Hilarious

Posted Jul 8, 2005 20:30 UTC (Fri) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link] (1 responses)

The major factors resulting in the shift from RISC systems to PCs have been
cost and performance. Linux has been the major enabling factor that allowed
that shift to proceed.

The major limitation of PCs running Linux for EDA applications has been
memory. 4GB isn't enough to eke the best performance out of some
EDA tools; and under Linux on 32-bit x86 you only get about 2.5GB for
your largest single malloc() and only a few dribs and drabs beyond that
under the normal memory model.

Even with a 4GB/4GB split you only benefit the additional malloc()s if
you're using the standard GNU C libraries (due to the placement of the
mmap()ings in the process/virtual address space). In addition enabling
this memory model incurs a substantial performance penalty on every
system call due to TLB flushing.

So the future of hardware for EDA is x86_64.

Given that conclusion we can ask what OS will dominate. The contenders
are Linux, Solaris/x86 (64), and MS Windows 2003 and XP (64-bit).

Solaris was only just released under open source and free licensing,
and the future of Solaris on x86 was uncertainly only a few short years
ago. EDA vendors shifted away from Solaris x86 during those periods
of uncertainty and the release of Solaris source code has been too recent
to have any impact on the development plans of most EDA vendors (or
any other major software companies, for that matter).

Windows only released their x86_64-bit versions a few months ago after
extensive (though moderately normal by Microsoft standards) delays.

Linux has been available on x86_64 since the platform was introduced.
Ports of the Linux kernel were used by AMD as part of the test suite
for their simulations even prior to masking out.

Traditional EDA tools were developed for various forms of proprietary
UNIX. Porting UNIX code to Linux has generally been a fairly
straightforward job. The worst problems have been with code written
to specific threading extensions (mostly Solaris) and those portability
issues are mostly mitigated by 2.6 kernels and the NPTL patches.

Porting UNIX to any flavor of the native MS Windows win32 APIs has
been far more work, and using compatibility layers such as Cygwin
or the old Softway Systems code (since then aquired by MS) loses most
of the perceived benefits that are touted as "features" of MS Windows.

In addition MS Windows is expensive (compared to Linux) and requires
a more expensive infrastructure (full functionality of MS Windows
basically requires a number of MS Windows servers and incumbent additional
client access licenses; and requires a number of anti-virus, anti-spyware
and other third party utilities). In addition to all that, and despite
many "studies" by "independent" analysts to the contrary, the performance
of a system under MS Windows for EDA applications is generally slower
than the performance of that same system under Linux. (In other words
Linux is a more lightweight OS, imposing a lower overall overhead on
the system).

So, why is Windows going to predominate in the EDA industry? Because
managers insist on running Outlook and therefore require Outlook clients
on the desktop systems of all their employees? Possibly. However,
it seems like there are far too many other factors that are converging
on Linux as the dominant platform ... not only for EDA software, but
for PCs in general. (64-bit PCs are inevitable for almost all desktop
and server system over the next few years; laptops are only a couple
years after that).

JimD
(This is just my opinion and should not be construed as any sort of
official statement by my employer, which happens to one of the top
for EDA software companies in the world).

Using all 4GB of 32-bit address space

Posted Jul 8, 2005 20:55 UTC (Fri) by jreiser (subscriber, #11027) [Link]

http://BitWagon.com/tub/tub.html describes an effective hack (including GPLv2 code) that lets you maximize usage by large arrays of however much address space is not occupied by the Linux kernel on x86: all 3GB in most standard desktop configurations, all 4GB-256MB in a "4G/4G" split. In many cases it allows several months or so of extra usage from your existing x86 boxes before x86-64 becomes required. Yes, the 4G/4G split does cost 10% to 25% CPU time for TLB flushes at system calls, but system calls often are not the bottle neck when grinding away on large designs.

Windows tipped for EDA standard (Electronics Weekly)

Posted Jul 8, 2005 20:50 UTC (Fri) by jeskritt (guest, #4092) [Link]

In Canada, our universities are lucky to have a government supported organization (www.cmc.ca) that supplies us with EDA tools and design kits (up to 90nm cmos). There are over 45 universities that use these tools and kits. Currently the primary platform is SPARC/Solaris. This is going to be changing as old hardware is phased out to PCs running linux. There was no consideration of using windows. The lab I run has 120 grad students, and two 4th year undergrad classes, that learn to design chips using cadence and ADS on unix machines. It is similar across the country.

I have friends working in the industry. Their standard setup farms out big simulations to linux clusters. It doesn't look like they will be changing their setups any time soon.

Windows tipped for EDA standard (Electronics Weekly)

Posted Jul 8, 2005 20:53 UTC (Fri) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link] (4 responses)

OK, I have to ask, since the article didn't answer the question.

What is "EDA"?

-Rob "ignorant" Knop

Windows tipped for EDA standard (Electronics Weekly)

Posted Jul 8, 2005 21:09 UTC (Fri) by cook (subscriber, #4) [Link]

>What is "EDA"?

Electronic Design Automation, not to be confused with the Eating Disorders Association.

The article's acronym has been expanded.

Windows tipped for EDA standard (Electronics Weekly)

Posted Jul 8, 2005 21:10 UTC (Fri) by salvarsan (guest, #18257) [Link]

> What is "EDA"?

"Electronic Design Automation."

The term mainly refers to CAD applications that create circuit boards and IC layouts.

While modest 32-bit CPU PC's can handle most circuit boards, you need much larger memory to handle chip layout.

Having used a few tools for small board layouts, I have to agree that the learning curve is steep. Ordinary things like copper floods and custom component design are underdocumented and an irritation to learn.

-salvarsan

Windows tipped for EDA standard (Electronics Weekly)

Posted Jul 8, 2005 21:18 UTC (Fri) by mikec (guest, #30884) [Link] (1 responses)

EDA = Electronic Design Automation

We went through this silly exercise before... as other posters have pointed out it was a lot of "sound and fury".

As far as the poor quality of EDA tools, I agree there are plenty of bad ones, but you have to be careful when you say that they are all bad and it would be "easy" for someone to come in and "eat their lunch".

The first thing so many new-comers try to do is create a whiz-bang GUI which looks pretty, but really does nothing to improve efficiency. I have no argument that there are efficiency gains to be had, but in this niche market you have to consider that:

a. It takes a lot of highly specialized knowledge to write a useful app, even the existing EDA vendors seem to miss this now and then...
b. You are dealing with orders of magnitude more data/information than most other apps outside genome work.
c. Your market is small, so it is difficult to recoup large investment either from license sales or support of free GPL'd software

Developinging multi-million+ gate ASICs or large FPGAs I am seeing the GPL'd world slowly getting to a point where basic bodily design functions can be accomplished with a free or nearly free tools, but we still have a long way to go. Mostly, unfortunately, what I see is lots of effort going into somewhat dated things interesting only to those taking early EE classes (scehematic capture for digitial logic for instance is just no longer useful).

The economics of this work seems to escape a lot of people... $5-15K for a license sounds like a lot of money but that tool is often used by someone who costs the company (on a net basis) 100-300k/yr. Tool costs are swamped out by man-power costs...

Windows tipped for EDA standard (Electronics Weekly)

Posted Jul 8, 2005 22:00 UTC (Fri) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link]

The kinds of work-saving improvements i'd like to see in EDA apps are REAL standard parts libraries (e.g. why can't you get symbols and packages in CAD format attached to the datasheet PDF?). An industry-wide standard for that sort of thing would save a huge fraction of the time required to design and check a board-level design.

People working at the chip level clearly have a different perspective. I'm approaching the problem from the viewpoint of the guy who integrates packaged chips and discretes into a working product (albeit, as I said before, as a hobby). I've had the opportunity to use friends' high-dollar EDA systems and I can't say I was overly impressed. The workflow seems exactly the same as when I was trained on pads and orcad a decade ago.

Windows tipped for EDA standard (Electronics Weekly)

Posted Jul 8, 2005 22:11 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Tanner makes a toy piece of EDA software that I've never actually seen used in the real world for real designs. It's used a fair bit in universities to teach chip design, but that's about it.

In 1996, I attended DAC (the Design Automation Conference, the big EDA event of the year) and everyone said we'd "soon" be running all our EDA software on Windows. Every engineer sniggered at that notion.

As it stands now, a lot of PCB software is Windoze based, but any serious chip design software runs on UNIX or Linux. The Windoze offerings are toys, useful only for messing around or teaching.

Count windows vs. linux jobs on Electronics Weekly's job board

Posted Jul 9, 2005 2:40 UTC (Sat) by dank (guest, #1865) [Link]

Linux jobs: 127
Windows jobs: 117

'Nuff said.

Windows tipped for EDA standard (Electronics Weekly)

Posted Jul 9, 2005 8:48 UTC (Sat) by OldRabbit (guest, #30886) [Link] (3 responses)

Just as an example of what can be achieved for very little outlay, this pcb

http://www.catnip.co.uk/consultants/peteharlow/optipic-00...

was produced using the free gEDA tools available at

http://www.geda.seul.org/

using an ancient 200MHz PC running Linux. These tools are more than adequate for this sort of application, and probably useful for teaching EDA as well.

More examples of hardware projects that use gEDA

Posted Jul 9, 2005 17:23 UTC (Sat) by ahvezda (guest, #19657) [Link]

Oh, didn't know about this one. Thanks!

For a few more examples of what is possible with the gEDA Suite, please check out:

http://geda.seul.org/links.html#projects

Also, for more Free Software/OSS EDA software and other hardware projects take a look at:

http://www.opencollector.org/

-Ales

Windows tipped for EDA standard (Electronics Weekly)

Posted Jul 9, 2005 19:43 UTC (Sat) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] (1 responses)

Ooh, well as long as it's a swap meet, this, this, and this were also produced using free Linux CAD/CAM tools, including gEDA tools linked in the parent.

show and tell

Posted Jul 25, 2005 20:48 UTC (Mon) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link]

Is it just me, or is this built into an old SPARC IPC/IPX case?

Greg

The real EDA standards

Posted Jul 11, 2005 19:22 UTC (Mon) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Got back too late to comment on this the first time around. Windows actually isn't used much for ASIC or processor design, though it is used heavily for FPGA design. The two largest EDA suppliers don't even support Windows at all for the majority of their applications; many full-chip designs need a 64-bit address space in any case. The industry as a whole has standardized their OS requirements, though individual companies might support more enviroments; see the EDA Industry OS roadmap for details. You'll notice that for Linux, you'll be expected to have RHEL or SuSE Enterprise.

Solaris used to be the most popular EDA OS; I believe Linux passed Solaris some time ago. Solaris on x86 is not in the roadmap, despite the popularity of Solaris/Sparc.