EDA101 Video

Years ago, before I rejoined Cadence, I developed a presentation called EDA101 that was useful for explaining to Wall Street types how the semiconductor and EDA industries fitted together. In some ways, it was a further development of some of the introductory posts in my old blog EDAgraffiti and the book that I put together from it (still available!). It was intended for non-technical people such as people working in banking, or industries that used chips without really knowing how they were created.

I volunteered to give the presentation internally at Cadence in late 2018, and then again in July 2019. It was presented as part of our program of expert speakers, who are usually (but not always) external. It turned out to be the most highly downloaded presentation of the series. I don't think application engineers would have learned much, but people in our less technical branches, such as HR, legal, and events, loved it. Many EDA software engineers loved it, too, since they knew all about the internals of one tool but not how the big picture of the industry came together.

Although the bulk of the presentation was general industry information, it was only intended for internal use and so contained confidential and sensitive information. I was asked to create a version suitable for external use and I agreed. Then...then we got locked down. So that was not going to happen until sometime much later this year.

But we did have the original recording of the presentation. So we updated the presentation slides, and edited what I spoke about, and created the external EDA101. It is 30 minutes long. I will warn you that if you have been in engineering in the industry for a long time, you might not learn much. But if you have a less technical role, you might finally learn how chips are designed, and manufactured, and who buys them. There's a bit in the middle about where Cadence fits in, but to be honest I'm surprised how little Cadence there ends up being in the video.

You might want to watch this on the YouTube site rather than below. The current version of the blogging platform has a number of bugs associated with videos, meaning that I can't make it wider than 550 pixels. But it is in HD and looks great on my big screen at home. If you need to find it on YouTube without the link, then find the Cadence channel.

Note that the video was originally made last year, so "next year" means 2020, last year means 2018 in a couple of places.

Contents

Cadence is in the EDA industry (and IP)

IC EDA and PCB EDA

Moore's Law

Economics of semiconductor manufacturing

Manufacturing: processes, fabs, and wafers

"Real men have fabs" and the fabless revolution

Fabless, the book

Design...and finally Cadence

The plane analogy

Canonical oversimplified design flow

Cost of design

Chips have to work the first time

End markets (mobile, automotive, HPC, IoT)

Wrap-up, yay!

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