2020 is known as the first year of China’s EDA development.
Time goes back to 4 years ago, ZTE and Huawei were sanctioned, and the Chinese semiconductor industry fell into a panic of being “stuck in the neck”. The technical EDA tools for electronic design throughout the entire semiconductor industry chain were included, and a large number of EDA tools have been included since then. Practitioners resigned from large factories to start their own businesses. Shunyao Electronics, Xingxin Technology, Xinhe Semiconductor, Quanxin Zhizao, Xinhuazhang, and Hejian Industrial Software were successively established. Domestic EDA ushered in a wave of entrepreneurship.
It started successfully under the historical opportunity, but in front of this batch of EDA startups is the product wall of full-process tools from the three overseas EDA giants Synopsys, Cadence and Simens EDA, which already own 70% of the global market share. Getting customer orders is even more difficult.
Among the many start-up EDA companies, Sunyao EDA established in April 2021 not only fills the technical gap of digital chip verification in the current market in the field of digital verification, but also fills the technical gap of digital chip verification in the current market by means of China’s high-speed rail. It has obtained customer orders within the first time, and has been positively recognized and affirmed by customers.
Exciting EDA tools to lift the fulcrum of the semiconductor industry
Fu Yong, the founder of Shunyao EDA, graduated from the Department of Electronic Engineering of Tsinghua University, and had a relationship with EDA during his college days.
Fu Yong studied under Liu Runsheng. At that time, his teaching and research group undertook a remote control chip project in cooperation with Samsung. When he first started to develop this chip, EDA was still in the early stage of development, and the chip design method was still 20 years ago. Fu Yong and his classmates had to use the gate-level netlist method to design and build this TV remote control chip.
Later, Candence and Synopsys developed a new chip design software tool, Design Compeiler (DC for short) and introduced it to China. Fu Yong and his teaching and research group described the circuit in VHDL again, and with the help of the DC tool Directly converting the circuit described in VHDL into a gate-level netlist based on a process library, Fu Yong experienced the efficiency and convenience of EDA tools for the first time, and was the first batch of people in China to use Synopsys DC tools.
Not only EDA users, Fu Yong is also inextricably linked with the first domestic EDA system “Panda System”.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Paris Coordination Committee imposed embargo control on China, and had to start self-research and research on EDA in 1988. This project called the Panda System was jointly tackled by technical talents from all over the country. The Tsinghua teaching and research group of Tsinghua University just undertook part of the work.
Fu Yong recalled that the master thesis at that time was based on the functional addition of the circuit simulation simulator (spice) of the University of California, Berkeley, that is, adding nonlinear device modeling to spice, which was related to the panda system.
After graduation, Fu Yong worked at Samsung. When he first joined Samsung, Fu Yong’s job was to use EDA software to troubleshoot chip design problems, that is, to use simulation verification tools to verify whether the circuit design conforms to the expected design specifications.
From Fu Yong’s use of digital verification EDA tools to the present, verification methods include Static Verification, Functional Simulation, FPGA Prototyping, Emulation and UVM general verification methodology ( These verification methods have different characteristics and are suitable for different stages of chip design. Among them, hardware simulation verification is much faster than software simulation. For a design that takes several days to perform software simulation, hardware simulation is used. It only takes a few hours, and of course the cost of verification will be higher.
When Fu Yong was working at Samsung, he used the Emulation tool from Quickturn, a veteran hardware emulation company. At that time, Quickturn’s products were not yet mature. As a customer, Fu Yong needed to constantly run in with Quickturn’s products and share the same experience with Quickturn’s technical engineers. Living is a common thing, and it is in the process of getting along with Quickturn that Fu Yong’s understanding of EDA tools has become more and more profound-although EDA tools may have a poor experience at the beginning, but EDA tools indicate integrated circuits to some extent. The future development direction of the industry.
Feeling the power of EDA, Fu Yong was very excited. He went to the United States at the invitation of Quickturn, and officially changed from an EDA tool user to an EDA tool producer.
Fu Yong, who entered the EDA industry, just caught up with the wave of EDA mergers and acquisitions. Today’s EDA three giants were taking large sums of money to conquer the entire EDA field. In 1998, when Quickturn was acquired by Cadence, Fu Yong also joined Cadence. Interesting Yes, when Fu Yong left Cadence to join Verity, another EDA start-up company, he joined Cadence again with mergers and acquisitions.
In 2015, Yong Fu joined Synopsys and was responsible for the technical strategy and customer support of the Digital Verification Products Division in the Asia-Pacific region. He introduced Emulation verification products into the Asia-Pacific region and achieved a compound annual growth rate of nearly 30% in the Chinese market in the past five years.
Do digital verification EDA’s “China high-speed rail” to fill the market gap
Having worked in the field of EDA digital verification for more than 20 years, Fu Yong has become more and more aware in the process of dealing with customers that although Cadence and Synopsys have a monopoly in the industry, it does not mean that their technical direction and ideas can perfectly match the needs of customers. The customer could not find the best solution and could only be forced to accept the industry-leading standardized products, which made Fu Yong realize that EDA tools still have fields worth exploring and developing, and digital verification EDA still has the possibility to continue to evolve. Sex, the seeds of resignation and entrepreneurship were planted.
In 2018, the ZTE-Huawei incident broke out. After the panda system, the state’s support for the EDA industry was insufficient. China’s EDA has experienced a blank window of more than 20 years. The company was established one after another with the support of policies. “It’s time to act,” Fu Yong thought to himself.
Under the circumstance that the three EDA giants have almost monopolized the entire market, if you want to start a new EDA company, opportunities and positioning are particularly important.
“During the development window of China’s EDA, the earth is like a watermelon cut in half. The current environment provides a growing greenhouse for domestic EDA, but after the golden development period of 5 to 10 years, the earth will become a complete Watermelon, domestic EDA will eventually go abroad,” Fu Yong told Leifeng.com.
This means that for EDA to start a business and choose domestic alternatives in the big environment is a feasible way in the short term, but in the longer run, if you maintain the difference with the Big Three from the beginning, you will have the opportunity to go further.
Fu Yong chose the second way, aiming at the digital chip front-end verification market technology gap, and designed and developed a high-speed emulator between software emulation and hardware emulation. When the scale of integrated circuit design or IP scale is large enough, traditional software simulation is difficult to meet customer needs, so the high-speed simulator ShunSim came into being.
In Fu Yong’s words, if the software simulation is a car and the hardware simulation is an airplane, then ShunSim is equivalent to China’s high-speed rail. It has its own unique market positioning and value, and will not make cars and airplanes disappear. Let the customer’s verification needs be efficiently met.
Fu Yong, who has a clear market positioning, thought about two things before founding Shunyao. One is to ensure the independence of Shunyao in terms of intellectual property rights, and the second is to explore the stability of Shunyao’s characteristics through the development analysis of the open source community. Develop technical routes.
The idea of the ShunSim team to develop a high-speed simulator, ShunSim, is based on the robust and safe simulation kernel Verilator, which has been verified by a large number of commercial cases, plus the upgrade of original design innovations, to support the verification of both large-scale integrated circuit designs and smaller-scale designs. Therefore, Shunyao Adhere to the contribution to the open source community, and promote the faster development of the industry under the open cooperation model.
In April 2021, Sunyao EDA was established in Zhangjiang. The clear market positioning, mature technical route, and market gaps that have not been captured by major manufacturers have greatly shortened the time for product development and application of Sunyao EDA. Recently, Sunyao high-speed simulation ShunSim will be officially launched to the market in June 2022.
It is understood that the speed of ShunSim is 10-100 times higher than that of traditional simulators. It has built-in Verilator, a robust and safe simulation kernel verified by a large number of commercial cases, and supports a variety of mainstream design and verification languages.
ShunSim is one of the five business sectors of EDA. In addition, EDA will continue to launch a new generation of system-level verification solution YaoVIP, application-level verification solution DVS in mainstream fields, professional verification services and EDA cloud platform.
In addition, Sunyao is also continuing to increase its investment in its contribution to the open source community, polishing the underlying simulation kernel, and helping the ecological construction of open source hardware.
The simulation speed is increased by at least 10 times, and some people pay for it half a year after its establishment
It is not easy for EDA startups to enter the market with the full-process industrial chain of the EDA three giants covering the market. Difficulty in acquiring customers and a long lead-in cycle are the two major problems facing EDA startups.
When a semiconductor practitioner communicated with Leifeng.com, he said that the development of EDA company needs to go through three stages. Iterative use by customers. It is enough to prove the importance of customers to EDA companies.
It is worth mentioning that the instant Yao EDA has only been established for half a year, and has already been deployed by real customers.
In Shunyao’s demonstration experiment, ShunSim showed its superiority in speed. Alibaba’s open-source project Xuantie RISC-V took only 59 seconds for simulation verification based on ShunSim, while it took 231 seconds based on a simulation software that sold the best in the market. .
In the Xiangshan RISC-V project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the running time of the ShunSim test case is only 8 minutes, while the traditional simulator takes one hour; the running time of the CPU test case of a leading IC design company has been shortened from 7 days to 3 hours.
Fu Yong said frankly that as of today, many users have come to inquire about Shunyao’s products, and Shunyao is also constantly iterating forward in the process of interacting with you.
“I think I am lucky, I have been doing digital verification for half my life, and the field of digital verification happens to be the fastest and largest segment in the EDA field.” Fu Yong said.
For ShunSim’s future development, Fu Yong maintains an optimistic and open attitude. Due to his experience in promoting Emulation to the Asia-Pacific region, Fu Yong believes that ShunSim can also have its own unique development path and be promoted to a broader market.
Fu Yong, who has witnessed the wave of foreign EDA mergers and acquisitions, foresees that Chinese EDA companies will also end in mergers and acquisitions. Fu Yong is very calm about whether EDA EDA will continue to develop independently in the future or be acquired by a larger company, “I hope that EDA will be able to work in EDA . The industry has its own historical place to be a respected company.”
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