[rathel]

Rest assured that one of the companies you mentioned has deployed a catalog of reusable software components not long ago. It's already quite populated. But the funny thing is, you need VP approval to submit your modules.

I agree that EDA companies are unnecessarily siloed and dated in many places.

Weren't it for the moat of hundreds of PhD's working on the algorithms, it'd have been disrupted to hell by startups.

[InitialLastName]

EDA software provides the infrastructure for projects with very high NRE and with low tolerance for failure (you can't just recompile and deploy a new chip design for free when you've already built a million bricks). Their entire business model is built around risk avoidance, so it would require an enormous improvement in efficiency for a client to take a risk on a "disrupting" startup's tools.

[kickingvegas]

I used to work in EDA/Semi-IP as well. In addition to the common argument that tool changes are avoided to mitigate risk because of expensive iteration costs, another rationale is that the design and manufacturing costs of making a chip are so high that integrators are less fixated on switching tools for savings because they are not that significant to the overall budget.

[rathel]

Yes, BUT... Each new technology node (excluding shrinks) already disrupts the flow in many breaking ways. Seemingly small changes, new DRC requirements, the need to model more side effects all cooperate to make porting to a new node all but easy.

[iancmceachern]

And you can't just upgrade the stack every 2 weeks during a 2 year project. There is a infamous example of this in the mechanical cad world with airbus and catia where they had to rebuild half a plane in a different version of cad

[daniel-cussen]

I actually looked into these.

There's a tradeoff between software skills and algorithmic skills. These guys are really really serious about algorithms, it figures their software isn't as good, none of that recent fancy shit, git at best. And it has to be PERFECT within its context, no fucking up or patching the fuckups with an if-else for that bug.

[UncleOxidant]

> Rest assured that one of the companies you mentioned has deployed a catalog of reusable software components not long ago. It's already quite populated. But the funny thing is, you need VP approval to submit your modules.

LoL this seems par for the course.

[analognoise]

And the fact that billions of investment in making chips that work is at stake.

That's a really, really, REALLY wide moat.