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| April 16, 2008 | Hacking Cough blog |
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| DFM heads into the foundry |
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| Portfolio Company: Blaze DFM |
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Sometimes, small deals can wind up changing the shape of a market. The deal between Blaze DFM and TSMC that has been gestating for close to a year is possibly one of them: it recalls the giant leap of faith that Artisan took when it came up with the "free library" idea.
Basically, Blaze and TSMC have cut a deal that will see the Taiwanese foundry use a version of the Blaze MO tool to alter transistors in a layout to make them less leaky just prior to manufacturing. The idea is not new and fairly simple: you make the transistor gate longer on logic paths that don't need to be fast. This typically shifts the threshold voltage up, which cuts leakage. STMicroelectronics has been offering the same sort of modifications using different logic cells. What is different is the nature of the deal between Blaze and TSMC and what it could mean for the whole DFM business.
Instead of trying to sell tools on a per-seat basis for something like a couple of hundred thousand dollars – the regular EDA business model – TSMC will host the tool. Although the companies will not talk about the money side of the deal, it does look broadly similar to the Artisan free-library model, where the foundry paid a royalty to Artisan for each chip made and charged a bit more for each chip to the customer.
For Jacob Jacobsson, CEO of Blaze DFM, this approach, in a way, opens up money that isn't available to the EDA tools vendors. "EDA has a had a more or less stagnant $3bn budget for as long as we can remember. It is more attractive for us to align with the manufacturing side of the business."
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