02608nas a2200121   4500008004100000022001400041245004900055210004900104260004200153520223900195100001602434856003602450       2011                        eng d  a1913-610200aDeveloping Silicon IP with Open Source Tools0 aDeveloping Silicon IP with Open Source Tools  aOttawabTalent First Networkc05/20113 aThe electronic design automation (EDA) tool industry is big business, and commercial licenses are extremely expensive. Open standards have driven many proprietary EDA technologies to be publicly released as free/libre open source software (F/LOSS) and some have become IEEE standards. Competition has partly given way to collaboration and has led to these standards. The development path of important EDA tools frequently now employs F/LOSS practices, which have overcome resistance to collaborative innovation between competing businesses. F/LOSS technologies are at the vanguard of leading-edge system-on-chip (SoC) design, not just because they are free, but also because they are valuable. 

The first commercial integrated circuits (ICs), designed by hand, helped guide manned space flight to the moon on the Apollo missions. In the past decade, silicon IP firms have shown they are limited only by their ideas, not by limited investment opportunities, and SoC firms have shown they can greatly reduce costs while innovating on the development of the largest new IC designs. This high-end technology is made accessible to startups because of open source. It is no longer just for mega-corporations. 

This article reviews the history of key advances in ICs and EDA tools. The common theme presented in this article for the driver of technology innovation is the requirement to develop the most advanced microprocessor possible. Today, a low-cost, high-value-added business model can efficiently serve the market for IC subsystems licensed as intellectual property (silicon IP) in the form of compilable source code. Alternatively, for larger SoC designs, engineering budgets can be shifted from the purchase of a relatively small number of high-cost EDA tool licenses to open source EDA technologies that can be run on massive compute-server farms. The two business models are not theoretical, but realistic. The author explains how his company (Crack Semiconductor) developed commercially successful cryptographic silicon IP using entirely open source EDA technologies and how another company (SiCortex) pushed the limits of IC design and open source EDA tools by simulating and verifying a massively parallel supercomputer.1 aLow, Arthur  uhttp://timreview.ca/article/442