Firm gears up to release 'reusable components'

Bullish on custom-built chip design tools

As semiconductor chips become more complex, with an increasing number of circuits packed into ever smaller slices of silicon, large makers of chips will find off-the-shelf design tools inadequate, say some specialists here.

Electronics design automation (EDA), as the $4 billion chip design software tools business is called, is coming full circle. "More chip makers will increasingly rely on in-house custom-built tools and/or outsourcing such work," say the EDA specialists, from SoftJin Infotech.

The in-house tools segment is estimated at some $1 billion. "We intend to tap this very niche services market, even as we gear up to build re-usable components for the EDA market," says Kamal Aggarwal, a vice president at SoftJin.

The firm will work with chip makers who need specialist design tools for future technologies "that commercial vendors of design products don't have", Aggarwal says.

In the last four years, the number of top chip makers using "in-house" tools as against commercially available products has risen three times, from nine per cent to 27 per cent, he says, according to a recent Gartner estimate.

In general, the EDA industry is a supplier to the semiconductor industry, making the software tools used by chip design companies to design chips. Most of them are product firms targeting specific parts of the chip design flow. The larger firms, such as Synopsis or Cadence, have products that target the entire design flow but the typical EDA firm has a single product or a couple of products, he says.

SoftJin, on the other hand, offers services to custom build EDA tools from scratch if need be. For instance, a unit of a Japanese conglomerate is working on a 3-d chip architecture that allows circuits to be stacked up in a semiconductor chip. This is like building a city vertically, instead of expanding it horizontally and so cutting down on intra-city commuting time, he says.

"We are developing a full suite of completely customised tools for physical design of the chip. It is a multi-year engagement and we are still working on it."

These chips will have applications wherever high speeds are required. Image processing, for instance, requires crunching data fast and this chip will be ready to be shipped to original equipment makers in a year or so, he says.

Traditionally strong in the Japanese market, SoftJin has worked with customers such as Fujitsu. In the last two years, it has leveraged such relationships to expand into the US, with Fujitsu Labs for instance, a research facility based in America. Some of the top 10 semiconductor firms and in-house divisions of large EDA firms are also customers, he says.

SoftJin has an interesting history, starting as it did as the EDA division of telecom products firm Sasken, also based in Bangalore. Sasken, in the early '90s, started out as an EDA company and SoftJin's promoters, Ravi Pai and Nachiket Urdhwareshe, essentially ran the EDA business in Sasken, Aggarwal says.

"When Sasken decided to focus on telecom products, Ravi and Nachiket decided to take the EDA business to market as a separate firm, in 2000. Some, from Sasken's top management, such as its chief executive officer Rajiv Modi invested in SoftJin in their personal capacity." As a services firm, initial capital expenditure, as now, was mostly in putting together a good team of EDA specialists.

Venture funding was avoided, and "we have been profitable all the four years". In each of those four years, the firm has seen revenue growth at 60 per cent compounded, Aggarwal says. A staff of 70 EDA engineers, many with masters degrees from the Indian Institutes of Technology, "has very high utilisation and this year we plan to add another 20."

"The advantage for us was we hit the ground running, with customers who were existing customers of Sasken; some intellectual property developed as part of the work at Sasken were transferred to SoftJin."

Presently, 90 per cent of the firm's business is services. SoftJin, however, is gearing up to announce a set of reusable EDA software building blocks "which we can use to quickly develop tools for customers", in some of the emerging areas of EDA.

One area is "design for manufacturability" or DFM. This is an increasing concern as chips are designed only to be found not amenable to fabrication. So availability of tools that help check if a design is manufacture-friendly will help cut the time to market a chip maker. The cost-benefits are obviously great, he says.

"You can no longer develop the tools in isolation. You need to be within the semiconductor company, understand the problems of manufacturing and processes. We see in-house tools development increasing again."

The EDA market is growing 10 per cent to 12 per cent but the in-house tools segment will grow faster, as 90 nanometre chips come to market and as semiconductor firms try new architectures. "The days of one-tool-fits-all are long done," he says.

'Chip'ping into the future

• Use of in-house tools has risen three times, from nine per cent to 27 per cent
• The EDA market is growing 10 per cent to 12 per cent but the in-house segment will grow faster
• As complexity of the chips increases design that is fabrication-friendly will become critical