Synopsys’ Dr. Aart de Geus at SNUG 2010 India!

"Moore's Law is absolutely alive and well," stated Dr. Aart de Geus - CEO & Chairman of the Board, Synopsys Inc., while delivering the keynote '20/20 Vision for 2010' at the Synopsys Users Group (SNUG) 2010 event in Bangalore today. He added that systemic collaboration is getting more and more important. "We need to have a joint vision of where our field is going."To make the 'machine' called SoC work, one needs to look simultaneously at economics and technology, and hence the word, techonomic.

Commenting on the global economy, he said, the industry had just come out of a very severe recession. Last year, Dr. Geus had introduced the recession compiler.

Today, there's a clear sense of turn, and a huge shift in the global economy during the recession. According to him, China will pass Japan and become the second largest economy. China has continued to evolve quite a bit, and so has India. Dr. Geus also introduced the recovery compiler six months ago.

He added that people on one side are looking at how to minimize costs and risks. How does this impact semicon? Most semicon companies are now reporting good results. Today, there has been about 5.8-6 percent of growth, indicating a steady state. Semicon is in the center to drive growth.

In the foundry world, there has been some consolidation, and you now find some really large ones. So far, semicon has rebounded somewhat much faster. The memory folks are also feeling pretty good. It must be noted that during the last three years, they invested really nothing in capex, and some players also disappeared.

If one were to look at cool killer applications today, there's certainly a theme around video more and more on mobile apps, HD, 3D, etc. All of this is leading to the fact that bandwidth and storgae will grow even more. Smart grids are also clearly becoming more important In future. The word 'smart' will be critical. "Eveything around us will commmunicate in some form or another, in future," Dr. Geus added.

Touching on active advanced designs and tape-outs, during Q1-Q2 there was some slowdown. Also, the 32nm/28nm nodes have been coming up pretty rapidly.

The race for advanced nodes is still on -- you can see it among foundries. Also, some node skipping has been happening as well, essentially taking advantage of some platform. Finally, the older nodes are getting more and more squeezed for costs.

Cost is key! Hence, it is interesting to see that Moore's Law is still evolving. It is far from over, noted Dr. Geus. The RoI on Moore's Law is also decreasing. As we go on to smaller nodes, it is becoming a value of integration. More functionality is also moving toward software.

To a query, he responded that consolidation of EDA is massive and it will continue. "We also need to be able to be more sensitive to costs, even as more design centers take place here."

Dr. Geus added: "We are by far the no. 1 in our field. We spend over 30 percent of our revenue in R&D." Synopsys uses about 10-15 percent of the revenue for acquiring new technologies.

It was really great to see a jam-packed room, besides the fact that the keynote was held first thing in the morning!