Spring Soft has been quietly going about its business for many years, providing very focused and reliable EDA tools at key pain points in the IC design process. Wired Island has worked with the part of the company which sells debugging solutions – the old Novas company – for more than a decade and throughout the years the company has been model of consistency. And customers love them for their quality and service, a rarity in EDA.
Even since the morph into SpringSoft, which brought together several discrete pieces of the Taiwan company’s holdings under one umbrella (and could have been disruptive to the Novas gravy train if not handled properly – which it was) – the company has maintained a steady pace forward. It has consistently brought innovation and improvement to how engineers debug and verify designs. Now. expanding beyond its core franchise in debug, SpringSoft has put more muscle behind its Laker custom IC product line (previously marketed under the Silicon Canvas brand). As a result the company once famous for its Switzerland-like neutrality, finds itself in the middle of one of the more interesting scenarios playing out in EDA – the interoperable/Open PDK frenzy. Laker is undoubtedly a very formidable tool on its own, but it could be the linchpin in the Interoperable/Open PDKs movement’s attempt to unseat the virtual monopoly Cadence has enjoyed in this space for years with its Virtuoso tool and proprietary PDK approach.
The net of what’s happening in this space is that all the EDA guys previously boxed out by Cadence want to level the playing field by having open PDKs (process design kits, critical to how IC get manufactured by foundries). The vision is to have common PDKs that work with everyone’s tools. Cadence has paid lip service to supporting the idea, but of course don’t want to risk their dominant position by letting a whole raft of little guys tempting their customers with frivolous talk of openness and flexibility and freedom of choice. The situation is muddied by the fact that there was originally a group called the Interoperable PDK Libraries (IPL) Alliance, of which SpringSoft was one of five founders. Since then Si2, which I am not really sure does for a living, has announced the Open PDK Coalition, which kinda sorta sounds like it wants to do the same thing and may in fact be using the IPL Alliance work as its foundation.
Anyway, regardless of who is in charge of the alphabet soup, because it’s all about custom IC design, it’s important to SpringSoft. So they have dutifully joined the Open PDK coalition and will have an influential seat at that table. More importantly, Laker has been selected as the custom IC tool in TSMC’s first Analog/Mixed Signal reference flow for its 28nm process…which is based on the same industry-standard OpenAccess (OA) database that the Open PDKer’s are advocating, but also uses the TSMC Interoperable Process Design Kit (iPDK). In the end. Great technology will win out, and SpringSoft has a track record of keeping its nose the grindstone and delivering value to its customers. We expect nothing different in the custom IC space.
