Hidden quality, crouching customer - how much does the quality of EDA tools impact electronic design?

Abstract

Description In today’s fast-paced electronics market, design engineers face incredible challenges keeping up with increasingly complex technology and time-to-market pressures. Many design engineers facing these challenges say that quality problems with their EDA tools cost them dearly in lost productivity and in missed deadlines. At the same time, the same design engineers also say that they urgently need better technology, features, and special functions in the EDA tools they use in their work. Thus, Quality in EDA products is crucial to customer success or is it? How much quality is enough to keep the industry moving at its fast pace? Is quality a hidden dragon that could cause customers to crouch in fear? What are the costs and who will pay for higher quality? Can EDA customers have their cake and eat it too? Examples of some provocative questions that can be posed are: “For the user is EDA quality worth the hype at the expense of technology?” “Do mainstream and power users want higher quality or more functionality” “Do users of front-end and back-end tools require different level of quality?” This panel will examine the core issues of quality in EDA products and the impact on electronic design — from the viewpoints of customers, EDA vendors and independent analysts.