gEDA-user: ICCAD panel mulls open-source software

[phartke@stanford.edu]

ICCAD panel mulls open-source software
By Ron Wilson, EE Times
November 12, 2002 (11:11 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eedesign.com/story/OEG20021112S0027 

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Open Source: EDA's next wave, or yesterday's hype? 
That was the question Larry Nagel, proprietor of Omega Enterprises 
(Randolf, N.J.) posed to a panel of researchers, tool developers and a 
user during the Sunday evening (Nov. 10) session at the 20th annual 
International Conference for Computer Aided Design (ICCAD-2002) 
conference here. Specifically, Nagel charged the panelists with 
documenting the problems, frustrations and solutions — if any — they 
had encountered in developing or using open-source code in the 
electronic design automation world.

First to reply was Andrew Graham, formerly president of SI2 and 
currently a consultant. Speaking of his experiences in overseeing the 
development and distribution of open-source code for the Silicon 
Integration Initiative, Graham said that the record was clear that open-
source was the way to go for rapidly proliferating a piece of 
infrastructure software, such as an interface or a library format. He 
cited about 3,500 downloads for the organization's Open Library 
application programming interfaces (APIs) as an indication of this.

But Graham admitted there were issues. Specifically, he said that 
maintaining integrity of versions and keeping to a predictable 
migration path were major challenges for open-source code, and that 
those issues could be addressed only by either a controlling monopoly — 
rendering the openness rather moot — or by an organization that focused 
and organized the inputs of users in the market. He described SI2's 
process for doing the latter: starting out with a pair of architects in 
the proverbial locked room, then gradually passing control of the code 
to a small change team, then to an approval process by a coalition of 
interested organizations, and finally releasing the code to the 
community. He warned that creating a license was a major hurdle — that 
for example, click-through licenses were virtually unenforceable 
against corporations. The bottom line, Graham said, was to somehow 
establish the trust of the user community.

Andrew Kahng, professor of computer science and engineering, electrical 
and computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego, 
took an altogether more militant stand on the subject, based on his 
work with the UCLA physical design tools project. 

The development of a physical design tool suite under an open-source 
MIT-style license, Kahng said, had demonstrated that not only 
infrastructure elements but also actual tools could be built in the 
open-source world. The suite was serving both academia and industry, he 
claimed: academia as a test bed for further algorithm research and as a 
benchmark, and industry as a prototyping platform, a benchmark and, 
ultimately, as a "Plan B" in the case of a project in trouble.

In a powerful summary, Kahng warned that the entire EDA industry and 
the associated academic community, taken together, were too small and 
too poorly funded to solve the massive problems of extreme submicron 
physical design without the collaboration — and the protection from 
reinventing the wheel — provided by the open-source approach. "It's 
relatively easy for academic researchers. We are supposed to publish," 
Kahng said. "But open-source is a discipline that industry will have to 
learn as well."

The industry representatives on the panel, Kevin Kranen, director of 
strategic programs at Synopsys Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.), and Stuart 
Swan, architect with Cadence Design Systems Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), 
both argued that open-source software was for necessary common 
infrastructure only, and then only when it was necessary to have a 
common base on which to build competitive products. 

The two representatives discussed their respective experiences with the 
Liberty Library format and with the SystemC initiative. Both cited 
struggles to get internal legal departments to agree to release 
proprietary source code without compensation, and more struggles with 
licenses. Kranen discussed how Synopsys had decided to considerably 
loosen its open-source license, originally based on the IBM public 
license. The company's goal was to abandon clauses requiring 
compatibility of developed software and to open-source any software 
derived from the licensed code. Competitors had objected to both 
clauses, he said.

Kranen emphasized continual support and interchange between users as a 
tool to keep people involved in the open software. Swan, who said 
Cadence decided to go open-source with SystemC in the hope of avoiding 
yet another language war, emphasized the need to confine control of the 
code to a small group and to ensure that all the participating 
organizations shared a common set of goals.

A somewhat different point of view was advanced by Greg Spirakis, vice 
president of design technology at Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.). 
Spirakis agreed with the EDA representatives that open-source code had 
a role in infrastructure, but not in the tools themselves. "Our 
experience indicates that operating systems and APIs should be open-
sourced," Spirakis claimed. "But we see no need, for example, to make 
our device models available to others."

That was somewhat different from the view held by Colin McAndrew, 
director of enabling technology at Motorola Semiconductor Products 
Sector's Analog-Mixed-Signal Technology Center. McAndrew, who said that 
basically his business was acquiring simulation models, decried the 
environment in which a plethora of device models had to be interfaced, 
one by one, to the many simulators used within Motorola. "We want open-
source to propagate models across simulators," McAndrew said. He 
identified two separate problems: the creation of new models and their 
interface to simulation tools.

On the creation side, he warned, "Everyone expects models to be free. 
But they aren't free to develop: they cost millions. And that leads to 
problems. I can guarantee that you aren't using the best models. The 
best model was developed by some researcher who can't get the support 
to distribute it. You are using a model that was developed by someone 
with the bucks to promote it as a standard." McAndrew claimed that 
developing models in an open-source environment would overcome much of 
that limitation. "Basically, the more help, the better," he 
argued. "But you do need a Bozo filter of some sort."

He also said that having a common open-source interface between models 
and simulation environments would be a huge help to users. This would 
avoid the problem of having to interface each new model to each of a 
dozen important simulators.