By Ron Wilson
Integrated System Design
Posted 03/14/01, 10:51:35 AM EDT

Munich, Germany - March 14, 2001 - DATE Conference - Peter Bauer, executive vice president for sales and marketing for Infineon, presented the EDA industry with a not very veiled threat in his DATE keynote address here today.

Citing the growing delay between when Infineon can first build chips in a new process and when they can first design parts for it, Bauer said that his company would have to have closer links with tool developers. And if those links don't come from the EDA industry, he warned, Infineon will look elsewhere.

"The delay is getting longer," Bauer said. "In the previous process generation it was about a year between when we could sample chips and when we could get timing closure with our tools. For 0.13 microns, we sampled our first silicon last June. But it may be two years from that date before we have tools that can give us full design closure, handling not just timing but power and the other new issues for this process."

For the 0.1-micron step, Bauer claimed that the issue would be not just design closure but what he called manufacturing closure — the ability to be certain that a design is not just logically correct and correct in timing, but that it is manufacturable.

He estimated that tools for manufacturing closuere could lag silicon by three or more years for the 0.1-micron node. Bauer suggested that the only visible way to reduce this gap was closer links to the tool developers. And he warned that if EDA vendors were not willing to form such links, Infineon would seek relationships with other semiconductor companies who are developing their own tools.

In addition to relationships, Bauer gave a now-familiar call for open interfaces, formats and databases for EDA tools, so that all EDA vendors could plug point tools into larger tool sets. He also strongly suggested that the industry look at a new revenue model: sharing the benefits of productivity growth with their customers rather than charging up front for seats or licenses.

"In many of our markets we have to make pre-investments for our customers. We feel the EDA industry should be willing to do the same," he said. But he did not suggest that Infineon was unwilling to pay for tools. "In some of our most advanced businesses, research and development runs up to 30 per cent of sales," he claimed, suggesting that a portion of that money would always be available for tools.

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