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Burning the Secret Sauce
When Paranoia Impedes Progress
“Our new RuleBuster DRC tool has successfully verified a one billion transistor 65nm design for… uh… a very large semiconductor company.” The presenter blushes a bit, looks annoyed, and then continues with his next PowerPoint slide. The six people in the audience all know who he’s talking about, and they’re dutifully impressed. He’s met the letter of the law on the agreement his company signed, although he is now far from the spirit of it.
When you make your living designing and selling electronic design automation (EDA) tools, issues of confidentiality and paranoia fly at you from all directions. Some of the world’s largest semiconductor companies (Can we say Intel’s name here? Whoops, there it goes!) have long-standing policies of not allowing suppliers to admit that their products were used by that company. Apparently the “Intel Inside” marketing campaign style doesn’t apply both ways. You won’t find a lot of chips from these manufacturers with “Synopsys Inside, Magma Inside, Cadence Inside, Mentor Inside, etc.” stamped on the top, even though products from all four of these companies (and likely more) were likely involved in getting that chip into the socket.
We don’t mean to single out Intel here – a lot of semiconductor and systems companies have similar policies and similar motivations. They feel that the tools, services, and IP that go into bringing their products to life all become part of their “Secret Sauce” and that withholding that information keeps their rivals at a competitive disadvantage.
Yeah, right.
Let’s say hypothetically that you work for a competitive semiconductor company (Oh, it looks from our subscriber rolls like many of you do. Welcome!), and you’re dealing with the problem of layout verification. Let’s have a quick show of hands as to how many of you wouldn’t know to check some of the four companies listed above? Oh, not too many hands in the air. OK, you two – go Google “layout verification” – yep, Mentor, Synopsys, CDN (that’s stock-market-ese for Cadence), a bunch of academic references… Whew! That big trade secret took us awhile to crack. [more]
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