cover image: The EDA Chokepoint Dilemma? Openness, Oligopolies, and China’s Ecosystem

The EDA Chokepoint Dilemma? Openness, Oligopolies, and China’s Ecosystem

13 Aug 2024

EDA suppliers to curb China’s technological advances at the cutting-edge and lower the barriers to entry for chip design at the trailing-edge and mature nodes to spark innovation across a variety of sectors. [...] and allied policymakers can do both at the same time—supporting an EDA oligopoly at the cutting-edge and incentivizing the development of an open- source EDA tool ecosystem at the trailing-edge—the paper will provide a brief overview of the global EDA ecosystem and the role that EDA plays in semiconductor manufacturing. [...] The last section concludes with an assessment of the two aforementioned incentives and why only restricting the export of EDA tools without a continued investment in open-source EDA tools might be detrimental to the long-term competitiveness of U. [...] The potential long-term trend of “open silicon” (open-source EDA, IP, PDK) is the reason why controlling the export of cutting-edge EDA tools to China needs to be complemented by a long-term strategy to “promote” the development of an open- source EDA ecosystem at the trailing-edge. [...] When policymakers are confronted with the dilemma of controlling China’s access to EDA tools and, at the same time, incentivizing the development of open-source EDA tools, policies should be shaped by a forward-looking agenda: The competition is not in a single technology but on the level of technology ecosystems and the capacity to innovate.

Authors

Amanda Kohn

Related Organizations

Pages
21
Published in
United States of America