Exportability of EDA industry from North America?

Some colleagues and I were discussing the situation with the high tech
industry, with jobs moving out of North America. This has hit circuit
designers hard, especially those in digital. Can EDA tool development
be expected to follow suit, is has it already happened? If not, what
are the factors that differentiate it from design work to make it less
exportable? Comments are also welcome for automatation of methodologies
for programmable system-on-chip e.g. reconfigurable processor arrays.

 

Sorry bud but its already gone offshore big time, Romania, Russia,
India all have EDA sites now, read EET to see who is doing the
shipping. I long lost interest in EDA except to create own stuff. The
EDA biz was always less profitable than the customer base so its no
surprise.

regards

johnjakson_usa_com

 

EdWin, the nightmarish Swedish PCB CAD system, has been "developed" in
India for several years now.

Paul Burke

 

It's already happening to a large degree. Most of the big EDA companies
have India/China SW R&D offices.

It's just as easy to export EDA development jobs as it is to export
circuit design. Might be easier since software developers are readily
available.

Probably the best bet if you want an EDA job in the US is to get a PhD,
but even some of the highlevel research is starting to move over.


It's not a pretty picture. The standard of living will likely have to
fall a good bit in the US before you see these kinds of jobs move back.

Phil

 

I read in sci.electronics.design that Phil Tomson <>

Or the standard of living elsewhere will have to rise.

The removal of WTO quotas for clothing exports from developing countries
is said to spell trouble for ... - no, Bangladesh! Apparently India and
China can undercut the Bangla manufacturers.

 

This has been happening for quite some time now. At first
(during the "good times") companies have been moving jobs
to India and China because there where not enough engineers
available in the US. Than during the recession, companies
have been moving/continuing to use India and China because
they *appear* to be cheaper than local talent.

And I think it is very important to analyze the cost "savings"
in greater detail. The truth is that engineers in these
developing countries, are less experienced and do not have the
needed background of pulling through large projects. As smart
as they may be, doing a large project and coordinating some 100
engineers is a tough task. My personal experience with products
coming from the developing/low cost countries, is that the quality
of workmanship is just not there YET. Many of the "savings" are
getting killed because things have to be rewritten/redesigned/fixed/
start over from scratch. Typically the decisions of outsourcing
is done by upper management without any feedback from any senior
engineers in the US. Managers and engineers are hired in the
developing countries with the expectation that they will deliver
good of same quality as their US counterparts. So far in my opinion
this has not happened (YET !).

I believe that in the next 5-10 years we will see the experience
level increase and the quality of products to start reaching the
same levels as what we would expect form US based engineers. At
the same time, I believe, these engineers expectations will be
raising as well. As these engineers become more senior and
experienced, many of them will have the opportunity to go to the
US and get a "high-paying" job. As such the "cost advantage"
together with the lower expectation in the US (which will be in
my opinion a natural development) will become a wash.

Overall I believe we will see a few swings back and forth of this
outsourcing "problem" the US is facing. After a while this will
become irrelevant as all of the developing countries will become
also leaders on the same level as the US. I think if the US does
not start attracting new internal engineers by providing more
incentives for students, it, as a whole country, will eventually
fall behind in the technology sector, which will be led by Japan,
China and India (in this order - I believe). I believe this fall
back, can already be observed in the automotive industry ...
And that, will be by far a much larger problem everybody in the US
will face than the outsourcing you see today.

Best Regards,
rudi
=============================================================
Rudolf Usselmann, ASICS World Services, http://www.asics.ws
Your Partner for IP Cores, Design, Verification and Synthesis

 

True. We'll have to meet in the middle somewhere. This is partly why the
dollar is falling (also because of the national debt, of course). The
fact remains that the US standard of living will have to fall in this kind
of a free-trade system. It's not going to be pretty for the US standard
of living to fall that way - it hasn't really happened before.

Phil

 

I understand that there must be some level of parity before the jobs start
flowing back. Regarding the comment about a Ph.D., I am actually speaking
about the outlook for someone completing an advance degree. Typically,
though, the relevance of even R&D tends to follow the prevalence of the
associated application, so if the industry practice moves elsewhere, the
relevance and value of the R&D is likely to follow (I surmise). So I'm
wondering how much the R&D in this area will likely be eroded in North
America.

As well, the angle I'm interested in is that of combinatoric algorithms in
mapping applications to prefabricated systems-on-chip, or configurable
platforms. That might be nonstandard enough to maintain a presence in
North America. It all depends on the experience and grounding of
alternative, more economic countries in this knowledge area. Especially in
terms of university activity.

I would also imagine that the more niche-like the area, the less attractive
it is for developing countries. It seems like the road to development
typically tries to capitalize on large anticipated markets for a particular
skill set or technology. I wonder how much this will protect against
erosion of R&D in North America. Of course, any opinions will necessarily
be highly speculative, but it would be interesting to hear rationales for
them.

Aside from the doom and gloom of predicting the potential decline of an
industry and area of R&D, I wonder about the likely challenges in transferring
the associated experience into other areas. Combinatoric problems are a
very general label, and I'm sure there is much crucial, domain-specific knowledge
to make such a skill set valuable.

 

I am beginning to think along these lines as well. Areas like datamining
or bioinformatics will likely dwarf EDA in terms of revenue (and thus
more jobs will be available in those areas). It might be
better to think of Google instead of [Synopsys|Mentor|Cadence|etc] as a
potential employer. I also am a grad student (with a lot of years of
'real-world' experience) and whereas I was aiming toward EDA in my
studies, now I'm starting to think about branching out into a different
area that might be growing faster... but I'm still very interested in EDA.

Phil

 

Then stick with EDA.
There is a very good chance that your future
job will not be directly related to your
course of study in any case.
The important thing is to enjoy what you are doing.

-- Mike Treseler

 

(Phil Tomson) wrote in

Meeting in the middle will be very hard for Americans, especially when
the middle will be population-weighted billions of Indians and Chinese
200 plus million of us in the USA. Already those high paid Malysians
and others in Asia have been squeezed by the even lower cost Chinese.
The middle probably represents a per capita income of $5,000.

Once all the technology and industry that are the basis of the USA's
strength are transported to Asia, we'll see how our position in the
world changes. Once all the technical people are over there, they will
be the onese in the drivers seat. And they will not need American CEOS
for long. No it won't be pretty.

Since China has its currency tied to the dollar, there has been no self
correcting economic feeback loop to stem the trade deficit with them.
Otherwise our currency would have fallen against theirs and the price of
their products would have gone up. Instead we are in a death spiral
with an elephant.

Not that all is rosy for the Chinese or the CEOs sending all the work
there. All the Chinese banks are insolvant, there is no financial
transparency, corruption is rampant, contracts may not be enforcable,
intellectual property is stolen outright, its difficult to take money
out of the country, the political situation can change at any moment, a
billion peasants are poor and restless and then there is Tiawan.

With those negatives you have to wonder what these CEOs are thinking by
placing their balls firmly in the grasp of the Chinese.

 

Hello Spehro,

It might not always pan out that way. I am just transitioning to a
European CAD program so the green flows in the other direction. They
didn't outsource it and still had the best pricing.

Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

 

Do you know that for a fact? A while ago I was talking to some
developers who worked with their company's "European" team on a large
software project- in St. Petersburg Russia.


Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany

 

That part of Russia belongs to the old definition of Europe, and most of
them wants to join the European Union, because in the European Union it
is forbidden to discriminate work.

I think it is more a question what the salary is compared to level and
quality of education. Many of the former east-block countries have
exellent engineers and they are not so expencive as the western-european
engineers.

It is such a pity that most of the politicians who put up the legal
framework for globalization never had to face competition on uneven levels

 

Yes, I believe that Western Russia (and Western Turkey, for that
matter) is European in culture. In this case, there was a deliberate
attempt to make it look like the work was done in Germany without
actually lying. Kind of like saying "North American" and giving a
North Carolina US address, but doing the bulk of the work in Cuba or
Honduras.

I imagine that they are indirectly profiting from it.


Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany

 

I read in sci.electronics.design that Svenn Are Bjerkem
) about 'Exportability of EDA industry from North America?', on Fri, 4
Feb 2005:

They did , but their levels were the highest!

 

Hello Spehro,

Sure, as a customer thousands of miles away you may not know for sure.
But there is one telltale sign that pops up when you have a tough
question. That will often require the original programmer or designer to
answer. Accents are really hard to hide. Like with a graphics card
manufacturer in Canada. When I got answers such as 'that's aboot right'
or I heard 'Bonjour' I somehow knew it's got to be Canada ;-)

Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

 

ATI and Matrox don't pretend to be headquartered anywhere else do
they?


Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany

 

No Canada, where ATI and Matrox hail from.

 

If you're getting lousy service, perhaps it's in Vientiane.