tangent
Top Mall-Fi poster. The T in META42.
Formerly with Tangentsoft Parts Store
- Joined
- Sep 27, 2001
- Posts
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- 58
Quote:
What's happened is that 99% of all electronics is mass-market. It's rare to hear of high-tech devices made in fewer than 10,000 piece runs, and not unheard of to hear of them being made in the millions. In such a market, the cost of the tools to make the pieces doesn't matter so much: every dollar spent on tools that saves at least a hundredth of a penny per unit is a good buy.
At the same time, digital has taken over the world. This enforces a whole different set of constraints on layouts. For instance, you have to be able to tell it that these two traces here have to be exactly the same length. If they aren't, there will be clock skew and RF impedance mismatches, so the circuit stops working. There's art to analog design, too, but it's a different art.
Another force that's acting on the EDA world is consolidation. There are maybe 4 big companies in this space; everyone else is either acquisition bait or too small to worry about, from their perspective. Just a few months ago, there was danger of this number being reduced to 3, but the tanking of the economy scuttled the deal.
All of this combined together means the cost per seat of the current high-technology EDA packages is so ridiculously far out of the reach of a hobbyist that we don't even talk about these options here. Back 15 years ago when my company was designing its first hardware, we got into one of the "cheap" high-end EDA packages for something like $5,000. That package has been through two company acquisitions now, is in direct competition with other similar packages, and so is only sold to its existing market, for more like $8,000 per seat. The stuff that's actually still popular goes for more. 5 figures a seat is not unreasonable in this world.
| Originally Posted by linuxworks /img/forum/go_quote.gif is it that tool makers just can't do a good job at this or that users stopped asking for it? |
What's happened is that 99% of all electronics is mass-market. It's rare to hear of high-tech devices made in fewer than 10,000 piece runs, and not unheard of to hear of them being made in the millions. In such a market, the cost of the tools to make the pieces doesn't matter so much: every dollar spent on tools that saves at least a hundredth of a penny per unit is a good buy.
At the same time, digital has taken over the world. This enforces a whole different set of constraints on layouts. For instance, you have to be able to tell it that these two traces here have to be exactly the same length. If they aren't, there will be clock skew and RF impedance mismatches, so the circuit stops working. There's art to analog design, too, but it's a different art.
Another force that's acting on the EDA world is consolidation. There are maybe 4 big companies in this space; everyone else is either acquisition bait or too small to worry about, from their perspective. Just a few months ago, there was danger of this number being reduced to 3, but the tanking of the economy scuttled the deal.
All of this combined together means the cost per seat of the current high-technology EDA packages is so ridiculously far out of the reach of a hobbyist that we don't even talk about these options here. Back 15 years ago when my company was designing its first hardware, we got into one of the "cheap" high-end EDA packages for something like $5,000. That package has been through two company acquisitions now, is in direct competition with other similar packages, and so is only sold to its existing market, for more like $8,000 per seat. The stuff that's actually still popular goes for more. 5 figures a seat is not unreasonable in this world.
