Leveraging Linux to optimise costs and performance in the EDA environment

In the electronics industry today, business forces and the frantic pace of technological development have intensified the competitive landscape. As a result, line-of-business (LOB) executives and chief information officers (CIOs) in companies that develop integrated circuits (ICs) face an increasingly tricky business environment. Surviving and thriving in this environment requires constant vigilance to stay abreast of market forces.

Shortening development cycles is the number one initiative necessary to maintain and improve competitive advantage and reduce time to profit. However, increasingly advanced and complex information technology (IT) solutions are needed to address disruptive technologies, and the increasing scale works against efforts to reduce design cycle times. Improvements in Electronic Design Automation (EDA) processes and tools are essential to reducing cycle times or even maintaining the status quo. In the coming months and years, the innovative application of EDA will differentiate developers, products and entire businesses by enabling them to remain on the cutting edge of product development.

Continuing business-as-usual investment strategies to address these EDA improvements could drive up capital and recurring costs to unaffordable levels. However, new technologies and new ways of buying computing cycles can help offset these spiralling costs. Now that two suppliers of mass-market microprocessors have delivered versions with 64-bit architectures, the cost structure of EDA computing is changing. And the low-cost Linux operating system unlocks the potential of these new low-cost microprocessors in a way that is compatible with existing and developing EDA tools, providing a two-fold price performance improvement.

Since Linux is an open operating system, it provides a neutral base that all software suppliers can use without having to commit to a single vendor's proprietary strategy. In this way, Linux provides indirect benefits by enabling new delivery models and pricing for the compute-intensive EDA applications. The benefits of Linux help electronics companies, such as semiconductor companies, consumer original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), telecommunications OEMs, computer and office equipment OEMs and medical electronics OEMs address both short-term cost and efficiency concerns as well as long-term strategic goals, such as the grid computing utility model and an on demand development environment.

To learn more about how Linux is enabling improvements in EDA, download the pdf file at the top of this page.