The chip powerhouses led by the United States have "stuck" on high-end chips exported to China. While more people are aware of the importance of independent control of domestic high-end chips, the key role of small and sophisticated EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tools in the chip industry chain has also become the focus of attention.

There are many, delicate and complex chip design links. EDA tools play an extremely important role in improving chip design efficiency, optimizing chip design, and ensuring chip functionality. Currently, the three major U.S. EDA companies (Synopsys, Cadence, and Mentor) account for more than 60% of the global EDA market, and most chip design companies require EDA tools from the three giants. Therefore, the United States can easily choke the Chinese chip industry by using EDA.

The domestic EDA with a localization rate of only about 10% faces the technical and commercial barriers of the three EDA giants that have been developed for 20 to 30 years. It faces great challenges to further increase the localization rate. Fortunately, the trend of open source and breakthroughs in AI and cloud technology have given domestic EDA a once-in-a-century opportunity to change lanes and overtake.

1. The localization rate of EDA is about 10%, and breakthroughs face bottlenecks.

EDA is at the upstream of the entire chip industry chain and is characterized by its small size and precision. According to preliminary statistics from market research and consulting firm Gartner in January this year, global semiconductor revenue totaled US$449.8 billion in 2020, an increase of 7.3% over 2019.

Looking only at the EDA market, CCID Consulting senior analyst Lu Penghao gave data last year that the global EDA market size in 2019 was US$10.25 billion. The Chinese EDA market size was approximately US$580 million, accounting for 5.6% of the global market. The total revenue of domestic EDA manufacturers was less than 420 million yuan, accounting for only 0.6% of the global market share, and the localization rate was only about 10%.

"Huada Jiutian contributes most of the localization rate of about 10%. Because many domestic EDA companies mainly focus on point-of-sale tools, Huada Jiutian has a complete set of tools for analog chips, so the market recognition is higher." Lu Penghao told Lei Feng.com: "In addition to domestic EDA making progress in the field of analog chips, some tools of Guowei Group and Guolun Electronics have also reached the international leading level. Companies represented by Xinhuazhang have open sourced some self-developed EDA tools and achieved certain breakthroughs."

Lu Penghao believes that it is difficult to break through the 10% localization rate of EDA and has entered a bottleneck period. There are two main reasons. On the one hand, although there are 2,218 IC design companies in China, there are only more than 200 with revenue over 100 million. Regardless of technical or financial level, most Chinese chip design companies may not use genuine software, and the market growth is limited.

On the other hand, domestic EDA has not yet realized the full process of digital chip design tools. Domestic chip design companies with revenue of over 100 million will still give priority to the EDA products of the three giants.

In other words, the domestic EDA market has limited incremental growth and fierce competition in the existing market. Lu Penghao believes that "to further increase the localization rate of EDA, the entire digital process must be realized. Once the entire process is realized, a rapid outbreak period will begin. Then, the ecology needs to be improved."

Di Zhixiong, deputy director of the Department of Electronic Engineering, School of Information, Southwest Jiaotong University, also believes that the most difficult problem for domestic EDA companies is survival, and then ecological issues. "Domestic EDA companies need to gain the trust of chip design companies and wafer foundries in order to solve their survival problems." Di Zhixiong said.

"Under the current international situation, most chip design companies are aware of the importance of controllable EDA. This is the prerequisite for domestic EDA to gain admission."

Wang Libin, who has more than 20 years of experience in technology development and company operation management of leading international EDA companies, and founded Xinhuazhang in 2020, told Lei Feng.com: "In the past, there were not many companies doing EDA in China, and they mainly made single-point tools. Now EDA has received national attention and there is a lot of market space, so EDA companies hope to be more complete, but it is not advisable to be greedy for bigness and perfection."

Changes in the international situation have forced China's chip industry to find its own path, and domestic EDA has also ushered in an excellent opportunity - open source EDA.

2. Open source enables domestic EDA to break through giant technology

Excellent opportunity and business barriers

Open source technology has been developing for many years, and the vigorous development of open source software is a key to the rapid and low-cost implementation of current software. Linux, GNU, Android and various open source AI frameworks can often have a revolutionary impact. Today, EDA open source is also advancing rapidly.

In 2018, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) proposed two new projects, IDEA (Intelligent Design of Electronic Assets) and POSH (Posh Open Source Hardware).

The reason, Di Zhixiong believes: "The research and development cycle of chips is at least one or two years, the cost is very high, and the technical threshold is also very high, which seriously hinders innovation in the field of chip design. These two projects shorten the chip design process from the two dimensions of IP and EDA, saving research and development time. I think that from the RISC-V instruction set to POSH to IDEA, this is actually an open source ecosystem that can jointly promote the prosperity of the chip industry."

Relevant statistics show that through the implementation of the two open source projects IDEA/POSH, the number of available open source EDA has nearly doubled.

"The current situation of the domestic EDA tool industry is that the barriers to technology entry are high and there is a shortage of teachers and courses in terms of talent. Open source can break down technical and commercial barriers, integrate and optimize the allocation of scientific and technological resources, efficiently stimulate and accelerate innovation, and quickly build a domestic integrated circuit design ecosystem." Wang Libin believes.

So, can open source EDA help the domestic EDA industry quickly realize the full digital process? Wang Libin said: "I think it depends on the technology orientation and resource investment. Xinhuazhang has a systematic idea, but it will become more and more difficult because the investment will also increase. It should also be noted that different EDA involves different links, the difficulty of open source and the ecological promotion effect that open source can bring."

Di Zhixiong analyzed from a technical perspective that if the open source point tools do not have a unified interface, it will be difficult to connect the point tools together. In addition, most of the existing open source single-point EDA tools have not been verified by commercial tape-out. At the same time, EDA tools for analog chip design and digital chip physical implementation particularly require open source process libraries and PDK support.

Lu Penghao pointed out that open source is a way for domestic EDA to realize the whole digital process, but now everyone is in the initial stage. With accumulation, it will be faster to realize the complete whole process.

In this case, why do you still say that open source is an excellent opportunity for domestic EDA? Although EDA open source cannot allow the domestic EDA industry to make up for its shortcomings in the short term, it can solve the talent shortage in the development of domestic EDA from the source. It is an industry consensus that high-end talents are the biggest challenge to the development of the domestic integrated circuit industry, especially for the small and sophisticated EDA industry.

"In the domestic teaching system, EDA teachers generally belong to the microelectronics or computer disciplines. No matter which discipline they are in, EDA is a niche. There are very few schools in China that can offer EDA courses. There is a lack of EDA teaching materials, and there are also very few students who are interested in EDA." Di Zhixiong said.

"With open source EDA, first of all, there are cases, which can provide better support for theoretical courses and experimental courses. In addition, it can also allow students to understand the internal algorithms of EDA. In addition, open source EDA does not require the purchase of expensive commercial tools. In addition, integrated circuits have been promoted to a first-level subject. With these supports, I think it will be beneficial whether we open EDA courses and start publishing textbooks."

Open source EDA will also have a positive effect on related research. It is reported that many researchers' papers are based on open source EDA, but open source EDA often becomes closed source after being acquired. "If open source EDA can provide you with some relatively complete EDA environments and processes, you can have a benchmark reference model, which can then verify the effectiveness of the algorithm or model. Therefore, whether it is scientific research or teaching, the urgency of open source EDA is very high."

Open source EDA can not only reduce the difficulty of talent training in schools, but also attract more people to join the EDA industry and accelerate innovation. Wang Libin said: "EDA is an interdisciplinary subject spanning computers, software, and integrated circuits. Open source is equivalent to giving a master version of a product, which lowers the threshold for research and development. It can also stimulate and accelerate innovation in scientific research institutes, universities, enterprises, and enthusiasts, optimize resource allocation, and cultivate many EDA talents through the practice of open source."

"When the industry gets better open source products, it will increase the frequency and breadth of use of open source EDA software. Such large-scale applications will provide more test data for open source EDA, further accelerate the development and innovation of open source EDA tools, and finally form an EDA open source ecosystem with positive feedback." Wang Libin further pointed out.

Domestic EDA companies not only seize the opportunity of open source EDA, but also use new technologies such as AI and cloud computing to change lanes and overtake.

3. Domestic EDA will change lanes to overtake

As a pioneer of open source EDA, Xinhuazhang launched China's first open source EDA technology community EDAGit in September 2020, and open sourced two EDA tools. Wang Libin said that at present, chip companies invest a lot of energy in a chip project for verification, because the losses caused by chip failure can range from wasting hundreds of millions of yuan in one-time production costs, to affecting the product's time to market or the company's reputation, leading to the loss of customers, which may bring a fatal blow. Therefore, verification, especially hardware verification, is one of the important winning points for technological leadership.

The two EDA tools that Xinhuazhang has open sourced are both related to verification. EpicSim is an enhanced and innovative open source simulation tool based on the classic EDA methodology. The simulator is the most indispensable part of functional verification. Another open source tool is formal verification "Effectiveness". The advantage of formal verification is complete and exhaustive verification. It does not require complicated environment construction and has high design convergence efficiency. It is suitable for early module verification.

Digital simulator process

"The digital verification field that Xinhuazhang focuses on is not directly and closely related to wafer fabs and advanced processes. Therefore, for us, the key to technological breakthroughs lies in talents. For the layout and wiring of the back-end and wafer fabs, we must consider opening up the application of open source products on different process nodes." Wang Libin said.

"Our open source EDA tools can be well used in the early verification of chip projects and in school teaching. We hope that we can inspire resource integration and optimization, so that both chip designers and EDA tool developers can use Xinhuazhang's open source EDA tools. This will quickly form a new technology ecosystem, stimulate the innovative vitality of these two groups of people, achieve breakthroughs in EDA technical and commercial barriers, and improve the overall efficiency of the integrated circuit innovation chain."

Di Zhixiong said: "Xinhuazhang's digital verification tools have achieved a breakthrough in China from scratch, and its 'EpicFV' open source formal verification EDA is also the world's first. Verification type tool sales account for about 30% of all EDA tool sales, with large demand and high market value."

Lei Feng.com learned that Xinhuazhang’s EpicSim tool has been adopted by commercial chip design companies, and has also achieved the goal of doubling the simulation speed in actual designs.

"Adhering to the path of open source is definitely a very good way to localize EDA." Lu Penghao said.

In addition to open source, cutting-edge technologies such as AI and cloud computing can also help domestic EDA change lanes and overtake. Wang Libin believes: "Foreign EDA giants have been developing for decades. If we use traditional methods and structures, it will definitely take many years to catch up with the giants. But new technologies and new structures can allow us to start from a new starting line and develop more advanced EDA tools without using the previous methods."

For example, the LLVM technology used by Xinhuazhang. Traditional EDA tools only support x86 architecture servers. If it is to be applied to ARM or RISC-V architecture servers, it will take a lot of time to transplant. Using the LLVM architecture can easily support different architectures from the beginning, eliminating the need for later transplants and enabling lane-changing and overtaking.

As for the role of AI technology, Di Zhixiong believes that AI cannot fundamentally promote the development of EDA tools, but it can be regarded as a black box similar to prediction to solve some more complex problems.

Lu Penghao’s point of view is that the world is studying the combination of AI technology and EDA technology, and domestic AI technology leads the world. This advantage will help us speed up the pace of catching up to a certain extent. There is also cloud technology that cannot be ignored. With the development of cloud computing, designing chips on the cloud can reduce the time-consuming chip design verification time in the chip design process.

4. Summary

As the source of the industrial chain, EDA technology must be innovated so that the overall efficiency of the industrial chain can be improved. 2021 is the first year of the "14th Five-Year Plan", and for the first time it is clearly stated that breakthroughs in integrated circuit design tools are needed.

When the localization rate of EDA is not high and the giants have strong technical and commercial barriers, open source is a good way for domestic EDA to change lanes and overtake. The 14th Five-Year Plan also raises open source technology to the national level. Xinhuazhang took the lead in launching an open source community in China and open sourced two digital verification EDA tools for free, which has a positive effect on lowering the threshold of the EDA industry, cultivating talents, and accelerating innovation.

Breakthroughs in cutting-edge technologies such as open source, AI, and cloud computing have given China's EDA industry a once-in-a-century opportunity to change lanes and overtake. Lu Penghao expects that based on the current progress, trends and market information, as well as the support of national funds and policies, there should be no problem in basically realizing the entire process of domestic EDA within five years.

Breaking down the barriers of EDA giants is challenging, but there are reasons to be optimistic.

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