The De-Coupling point principle put forth by Clayton M. Christensen, Christopher S. Musso and Scott D. in their article “MAXIMIZING THE RETURNS FROM RESEARCH”, says that “The company developing a new technology must plan to integrate forward from the point at which a new technology is developed, across every interdependent interface in the chain of value-adding activities out to that point at which there is a modular interface with the next stage of value-added.” They say that, it is the activity just before the decoupling point where the most attractive profitability in the value chain can be achieved. The reason for this is that performance in a modular product is not determined within the product’s architecture, but within the subsystems from which the modular product is assembled. At the stage of value-added just before the decoupling point, performance differences are determined primarily by the interdependent architecture and less by the components that are used.
EDA industry is very competitive and is more technology driven than any other field in the IT industry. As the design complexities increase, designers demand more innovative and complex tools and as the time to market pressures are increasing (for many chips it is less than 6-9 months), EDA companies are always under great pressure to roll out sophisticated tools to understand and solve design complexities . Having said this, it can be easily understood that EDA industry works in tight integration with the Design companies and the manufacturers. Each chip is designed in a different way and the Methodology engineers propose new
Methodologies and flows which indirectly puts pressure on the EDA industry.
Now let’s look at various perspectives: An EDA Startup Company can roll out sophisticated software for a specific stage in the ASIC/FPGA/Structured ASIC design flow. The problems typical EDA start-up companies’ faces are: They have to make sure that the algorithm on which they built the software delivers both the performance (how fast the tool can analyze the design sources say RTL or Netlist) and the design capacity it can handle (20 million gate design is very typical now-a-days), the output of the tool should be compatible with the tools from the four big giants (Cadence, Synopsys, Mentor and Magma) so that the designer can take the output from the tool and use it in the next steps of the design flow with the implementation tools. The tool interoperability issues are always a painful task for the EDA engineers.The success rate for the EDA startups is very less for the reason said earlier. They have to see a way where their tool suite can be seamlessly integrated. So for EDA startups, the De-Coupling point lies in effectively addressing the design complexities, able to handle higher capacity and performance that the competitor tools. But the companies have to keep in mind that de-coupling point might shift to higher point in the value chain.
For an already big company like Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor, their de-coupling point doesn’t lie in the new tool offerings, but rather understanding the design flow gaps in the already offered tools and quickly filling it out and thus enabling a better and fully integrated platform.
If anyone out there has any ideas/opinions on the de-coupling point…please comment….
