How manycore will reshape EDA

Abha Maheshwari, Cadence Design Systems
3/7/2011 12:50 PM EST

It is difficult to imagine a world without the smartphones, tablets, e-readers and game consoles that are pervasive in our lives today. Behind such innovations are embedded systems. To provide the automation and the speed to build them, EDA companies are taking advantage of the parallelism offered by multiple cores. All claim some multithreading and multicore capabilities and are porting more code to multithreaded applications.

This is certainly no easy task. EDA code is complicated, and EDA developers must work within Amdahl’s Law, which states that the gains you get from parallelizing code are sharply limited by any section that cannot be parallelized. Thus, if 90 percent of the code is parallelized and 10 percent is not, the maximum gain expected is 10x.

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