4 ms·

EDA tools vary in license costs, from a few thousand dollars per machine license per year, to half a million per core license per year. Timing tools aren’t

by azernik 13y ago

EDA tools vary in license costs, from a few thousand dollars per machine license per year, to half a million per core license per year. Timing tools aren’t all the way at the top end, but they’re not cheap. I have never in my life touched software this expensive. It's interesting to me how this warps workflows - e.g. automated testing tools can only test one build every two days, not because running in parallel is computationally expensive, but because licensing is too expensive in cash terms. Given the zero marginal costs (to software vendors) of existing customers running extra copies, this sounds completely insane to me.

jacquesm 13y ago
You're entirely free to roll your own and to open source it.
- azernik 13y ago
  Oh, that wasn't a personal complaint - I'm not in the field, and don't know enough about it to roll my own. I'm more curious how this is sustainable as a business model, and how buyers of this software react to this kind of restriction.
  - jacquesm 13y ago
    That's because buyers do not generally see it as a restriction. The world you're referring to is not 'virtual', it is solidly grounded in capital goods for production. At the costs of a typical spin the use of the software is a very very small fraction, and that fraction is gladly paid because it avoids unnecessary spins (think of a spin as an 'edit-compile-test' cycle, only with a price tag of a few hundred K on the low end to a few million and up on the high end). The software you're talking about has 1000's of manyears and sometimes 10's of thousands or even higher numbers of manyears involved in writing, testing, debugging. The present day value of that investment is so large that it serves as a defensible moat against any upstart company entering the market with a competing product, and if they do they will likely end up pricing it the same or higher (once they have the bugs worked out...). Open source works well for fields where there are 100's of thousands of potential users for something that you can build in a reasonable amount of time and which does not require extensive domain knowledge spread out over lots of individuals. For software like this, specialized, very expensive to develop and with a limited audience licenses are still the way it is done and as far as I can see it's the only model that makes sense. The alternative, bespoke software would be far more expensive still, the licenses are at least affordable to those who need them.
    - pjc50 13y ago
      I agree; market entry to EDA, even for a "utility" that you add to the build chain to improve your results, is extremely hard.
    - nkurz 13y ago
      I appreciate your perspective, but I have great trouble getting past the feeling that this system is woefully societally inefficient. It seems so wasteful to have a handful of companies, each putting in tens of thousands of hours for products that do essentially the same thing, striving for lock-in and barrier to entry. Yes, this is better than requiring each hardware company develop their own. But maybe there are other solutions that still result in the tools being available, both to those who can currently afford it and to those who can't? A shorter copyright term seems like one step in that direction. Nationalize one of the firms and open source it, leading to both a lower priced alternative and greater price competition for the remaining? I guess it's a question of what the goal is. I'd put global accessibility to the developed technology up very high, and presume that dropping the cost and barriers to entry for both the hardware and software firms would help this.
josteink 13y ago
In my experience, software tailored for specific industries, sciences and academia, the electronics industry specificly, typically have prices in this range. The narrower the field and harder the science, the fewer (and more expensive) candidates will be sufficiently competent to implement the software and the lesser audience for the software-publisher to recoup their RnD investment with, so prices tends to go up. Once you need software to support engineering-disciplines not software, they know you will be able to pay the bill and find the software worthwhile compared to doing the same work manually with expensive engineers.
StringyBob 13y ago
I use these types of software day to day. The true price is veiled behind multi milkion dollar contract negotiations. You should see the inverse relationship between price and lack of bugs. What's more of a challenge is trying to use techniques like continuous integration when your compile time is a week!
- robomartin 13y ago
  > What's more of a challenge is trying to use techniques like continuous integration when your compile time is a week! And your simulation time is another week. And interpreting the results could be another week. I've worked on designs where you can only do one iteration per day to on iteration per week. It really slows down development to a crawl. You learn very quickly to segment designs and validate everything as far as humanly possible before even dreaming of simulating/compiling larger functional blocks. These are ways in which modern hardware design is vastly different and vastly more expensive than any comparable software development workflow. The cost of hardware tools is pretty much insignificant when you consider the entire process. Buying a $50,000 signal analyzer might save you weeks or months of development and debug time. You can't launch into these kinds of startups with a $15K investment over a summer.
pjc50 13y ago
It's nothing at all to do with the marginal cost and all to do with extracting marginal _value_ from your tiny customer base with a high cost of sales. I worked in an EDA startup for a decade before we were bought by Cadence. Getting people to evaluate our tool generally took a few months of a technical presales person's time. We only ever acquired a few dozen customers: there aren't all that many ASIC companies. Most required at least one custom feature. Therefore there's an elaborate commercial negotiation to take as much money as possible from the customer in order to amortize the R&D. Given manufacturing fixed costs of $250k, spending $250k on software to get it right starts to look reasonable.

by azernik 13y ago

jacquesm 13y ago

You're entirely free to roll your own and to open source it.

azernik 13y ago
Oh, that wasn't a personal complaint - I'm not in the field, and don't know enough about it to roll my own. I'm more curious how this is sustainable as a business model, and how buyers of this software react to this kind of restriction.
- jacquesm 13y ago
  That's because buyers do not generally see it as a restriction. The world you're referring to is not 'virtual', it is solidly grounded in capital goods for production. At the costs of a typical spin the use of the software is a very very small fraction, and that fraction is gladly paid because it avoids unnecessary spins (think of a spin as an 'edit-compile-test' cycle, only with a price tag of a few hundred K on the low end to a few million and up on the high end). The software you're talking about has 1000's of manyears and sometimes 10's of thousands or even higher numbers of manyears involved in writing, testing, debugging. The present day value of that investment is so large that it serves as a defensible moat against any upstart company entering the market with a competing product, and if they do they will likely end up pricing it the same or higher (once they have the bugs worked out...). Open source works well for fields where there are 100's of thousands of potential users for something that you can build in a reasonable amount of time and which does not require extensive domain knowledge spread out over lots of individuals. For software like this, specialized, very expensive to develop and with a limited audience licenses are still the way it is done and as far as I can see it's the only model that makes sense. The alternative, bespoke software would be far more expensive still, the licenses are at least affordable to those who need them.
  - pjc50 13y ago
    I agree; market entry to EDA, even for a "utility" that you add to the build chain to improve your results, is extremely hard.
  - nkurz 13y ago
    I appreciate your perspective, but I have great trouble getting past the feeling that this system is woefully societally inefficient. It seems so wasteful to have a handful of companies, each putting in tens of thousands of hours for products that do essentially the same thing, striving for lock-in and barrier to entry. Yes, this is better than requiring each hardware company develop their own. But maybe there are other solutions that still result in the tools being available, both to those who can currently afford it and to those who can't? A shorter copyright term seems like one step in that direction. Nationalize one of the firms and open source it, leading to both a lower priced alternative and greater price competition for the remaining? I guess it's a question of what the goal is. I'd put global accessibility to the developed technology up very high, and presume that dropping the cost and barriers to entry for both the hardware and software firms would help this.

josteink 13y ago

In my experience, software tailored for specific industries, sciences and academia, the electronics industry specificly, typically have prices in this range. The narrower the field and harder the science, the fewer (and more expensive) candidates will be sufficiently competent to implement the software and the lesser audience for the software-publisher to recoup their RnD investment with, so prices tends to go up. Once you need software to support engineering-disciplines not software, they know you will be able to pay the bill and find the software worthwhile compared to doing the same work manually with expensive engineers.

StringyBob 13y ago

I use these types of software day to day. The true price is veiled behind multi milkion dollar contract negotiations. You should see the inverse relationship between price and lack of bugs. What's more of a challenge is trying to use techniques like continuous integration when your compile time is a week!

robomartin 13y ago
> What's more of a challenge is trying to use techniques like continuous integration when your compile time is a week! And your simulation time is another week. And interpreting the results could be another week. I've worked on designs where you can only do one iteration per day to on iteration per week. It really slows down development to a crawl. You learn very quickly to segment designs and validate everything as far as humanly possible before even dreaming of simulating/compiling larger functional blocks. These are ways in which modern hardware design is vastly different and vastly more expensive than any comparable software development workflow. The cost of hardware tools is pretty much insignificant when you consider the entire process. Buying a $50,000 signal analyzer might save you weeks or months of development and debug time. You can't launch into these kinds of startups with a $15K investment over a summer.

pjc50 13y ago

It's nothing at all to do with the marginal cost and all to do with extracting marginal _value_ from your tiny customer base with a high cost of sales. I worked in an EDA startup for a decade before we were bought by Cadence. Getting people to evaluate our tool generally took a few months of a technical presales person's time. We only ever acquired a few dozen customers: there aren't all that many ASIC companies. Most required at least one custom feature. Therefore there's an elaborate commercial negotiation to take as much money as possible from the customer in order to amortize the R&D. Given manufacturing fixed costs of $250k, spending $250k on software to get it right starts to look reasonable.