News
July 7, 2004 EETimes
By:Margarette Teodosio Electronic Engineering Times - Asia

Malaysian EDA tool vendor optimistic for Asia market

According to Electronics Design Automation (EDA) tool developer Exsedia Sdn Bhd, the Asian region is a growing market in terms of electronics design and EDA tools purchases.

"Most of the East Asian governments are pushing for a more knowledge-based economy and have policies that are addressing the technology issues," said CEO Abdul Razak Bahrom. "What they are doing is pushing their own standards, pushing their own initiatives in terms of technologies and electronics."

Eriko Motoyama, Director of Corporate Strategies, added, "The Asian market is a little bit different from the U.S. or European market where there is a great drive to strengthen their design activities. This could be driven by national initiative or, as they say, outsourcing to Asia as a business opportunity. And so there is a sudden rise in the need for IC designers."

As proof of their trust in the Asian market, the company released its first product in Beijing last March during the IIC-China Conference.

The algorithmic state machine
Enabling both novice and experienced IC engineers in getting started on their designs quickly, the Nimbus tool is a design capture tool of algorithmic designs using a methodology called ASM (algorithmic state machine). Through the ASM methodology, the high-level tool allows users to create both data path and control path elements of a design.

"We believe that Nimbus, using the ASM approach, is a natural solution to the design entry methodology," Bahrom shared. According to him, a client in Europe was able to cut its design entry process by about 70 percent with the said methodology.

Meanwhile, the company is also preparing for the release of an IP design management tool that, together with Nimbus, will help engineers design, document, reuse and share designs among team members, thus cutting down on the development cycle. According to Motoyama, the new tool - iPallette, which is scheduled for release later this month during the Taiwan EDA&T, will be more of a block editor tool.

Partnership with educational institutions
Based in Malaysia, Exsedia specializes in the design and development of EDA front-end solutions. "We see ourselves as the bridge between electronics system level and RTL level by enabling designers to express design at a functional level where there is no hardware detail," Motoyama stated.

But, she stressed, we also allow enough RTL for the designs to be used for good architectural trade-off analysis.

As part of the company's efforts to establish a "culture of strong private industry and academic R&D endeavors," it has set up the ExSeed partnership program, which is a collaboration with universities and institutions for "commercially viable research."

Presently, Exsedia is working with Tsinghua University in China, Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea, and University of South Carolina in the U.S.