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

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.