Unix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena

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July 01, 1999 (5:11 PM EDT)

By Brian Fuller and Rick Merrit

A scant year ago, Windows NT seemed like a shoo-in to nip at the heels of Unix as the operating system of choice for workstations. Both CAD applications and the particularly hard-to-crack EDA market would tilt toward NT, many analysts agreed.

But based on the evidence of recent weeks, such optimism seems to be waning, despite the fact that many new workstation models from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, IBM and Silicon Graphics offer a choice of either NT or Unix.

"Sales of personal workstations in the EDA space have been disappointing," said Jim Wagner, market segment manager for the workstation division of Compaq Computer, in Littleton, Mass. "In part, all the discussion around Linux slowed things down. As much as anything, the problem has simply been an emotional issue in the market."

Microsoft counters a large installed base is helping to prop up the venerable Unix. In addition, said Ajay Sikka, Microsoft's marketing manager for engineering, "No one will take their investment in [Sun's] Solaris [operating system] and just throw it away." Sikka also noted the vital importance of new EDA-specific applications to entice users toward NT. Such porting will take time, Sikka added.

"Our focus is to show we're in it for the long run. Microsoft and Intel are readying the path of migration," he said.

Surprisingly, the biggest buzz surrounds a newcomer without a heavy-hitting corporate parent -- the Unix-likeLinux operating system. Synopsys ported its VCS simulator to Linux earlier this year, and Avant has ported its Polaris tool as well.

Steve Smith, marketing director for the Simulation Technology Group at Synopsys, in Mountain View, Calif., said his customers spend more than half their design cycles verifying functionality of designs. VCS running on the new HP systems "offers compelling price/performance points" for customers, he added.

Big Change
The fortunes of Linux and NT have virtually reversed over the past year, with NT moving from sure thing to straggler. In March 1998, Intel and Microsoft joined together to host a "Workstation Leadership Forum" near the software giant's headquarters with the objective of convincing EDA users to switch from Unix to NT.

Aart de Geus, chairman and CEO of Synopsys, said EDA on the Intel/NT platform would rise from a minuscule half a percent in 1998 to 20 or 25 percent by 2000.

However, he also added a major caveat: "Our customers have huge investments in environments and infrastructure," de Geus said. "That's important, because it takes a long time to set up a big engineering environment that really works well. This alone implies that if and when people move to NT, they will want to do it carefully."

Fast-forward to the Design Automation Conference in New Orleans last month, where Synopsys appeared a lot less gung-ho on NT, despite steadily porting EDA applications to the OS.

"We have been putting most of our tools on NT but it's not a platform that has been having much impact," said de Geus at DAC. "We expected it would have price/performance benefits but the installed base of Unix systems has a value in the billions." Asked why the uptake has been slow, de Geus said, "NT itself was not robust enough in its file system and reliability."

Gary Smith, principal EDA analyst at Dataquest, cited delays in rolling out support for 64-bit applications and support for transferring large data files. "NT missed the window in EDA," he said. "Microsoft has not come out with any of the feature sets needed for the OS in EDA. The question is whether they will pay attention to a market that consists of [only] 350,000 seats."

In terms of numbers, Dataquest significantly downgraded its forecast for Windows NT-based EDA revenue at this year's DAC. Smith showed a forecast of $270 million in 1999, a far cry from the $421 million predicted at last year's Dataquest DAC briefing.

In 2000, Dataquest predicts NT-based revenue will be $336 million, against $3 billion for Unix-based revenue. Several years ago some analysts thought NT would be half of the EDA market by 2000.

Market analysts at IDC are less pessimistic. Their 1999 report predicts a growth rate of 36.2 percent for NT in the EDA market.

Windows NT is being widely adopted for PC-board and FPGA design, but not for ASIC and IC design, which make up the vast majority of EDA industry revenues. Faced with multimillion-gate chip design problems, an increasing number of EDA vendors and users are moving to 64-bit Unix platforms. At DAC, for instance, Avant, Chrysalis, Monterey Design and Snaketech all announced support for 64-bit HP-UX 11 platforms. Magma Design Automation announced plans to port its place and route tools to Sun's Solaris 7 64-bit OS.

Yet, Intel is optimistic that high-end applications will eventually come over to the NT/Intel combo. "In high-end apps I would still characterize the Intel platform as being at the early stages," said Andre Wolper, marketing director of Intel's workstation products group. The performance of the platform is not in question. It's really a matter of application migration and of OS preferences. There are a lot of existing [Unix] scripts and tools that don't port easily to NT. Also, there's an affinity for Unix among EDA users that's stronger than what I've seen in other market segments."

Linux Leverage
In that regard, growth of the Linux OS is proceeding apace. "We found we had a 1,000 person Linux user group at Intel," Paul Otellini, executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Business Group, said at DAC. Linux is growing particularly rapidly in back-end applications such as verification with Synopsys' VCS.

Intel's own engineers are adding a base of Linux workstations alongside their NT models, according to Greg Spirakis, general manager of design technology at Intel's microprocessor group. The group uses several thousand workstations and recently started buying several hundred Intel-based systems for the first time. The back-end systems tend to use Linux while desktop systems using collaborative applications have been for NT, he said.

Workstation vendors, too, are capitalizing on Linux's growing following. For one, Hewlett-Packard has just rolled out two low-end models -- the Visualize PL450 and the XL550 -- that are preconfigured with Red Hat Software's version of Linux.

"There's a nice end-user uprising for Linux," said Roger Jollis, manager of worldwide marketing programs, for HP's workstation systems division, in Fort Collins, Colo.

Kathy Carlson, manager of EDA market development for HP, said NT is catching on in mechanical CAD, but not nearly as much as once predicted in CAE.

"We need new tools all the time" in EDA, she said. "NT doesn't have all the open file structures and Linux has a lot of open support. For engineers, the performance exceeds NT and they can still get MS Office on it."

Additional reporting by Richard Goering and Alexander Wolfe