Since co-founding Synopsys in 1986, Aart de Geus has expanded Synopsys from a start-up synthesis enterprise to a leading player in electronic design automation (EDA). The $1.54 billion Mountain View, California-based company supplies the global electronics market with the software, intellectual property and services used in semiconductor design and manufacturing. Synopsys? solutions help address the key challenges designers and manufacturers face today, such as power and yield management, system-to-silicon verification and time-to-results. Aart has long been considered one of the world?s leading experts on logic simulation and logic synthesis. In a recent interaction with Sudhir Chowdhary, he provides insights into the ever-evolving semiconductor

industry and some of the lessons learned as he led his company in a constantly changing environment. Excerpts:

What is the potential of EDA market

globally and how do you see this growing in India?

We provide the global electronics market with the software, intellectual property and services used in semiconductor design and manufacturing. Therefore, in many ways we could say that we are at the heart of high technology. There are two main challenges to designing advanced chips. The first is how to manufacture something that is small in terms of feature, and the second challenge is to design something that is complex, in terms of the number of transistors.

With chip technology, in the last three years from the introduction of the iPads to the growth of the social media, these are the direct result of the transistor revolution. So in that context, EDA which used to be a very deep individual product is now a very deep technology product. Synopsys has now emerged as the leader of this industry; an industry which is still evolving and is embedded in a $300 billion semiconductor industry which in turn is embedded in a $12.5 trillion electronic industry.

How important is EDA for some of the sectors like automotive, aerospace, military, mobile devices etc?

It is rapidly becoming very important. Companies like Bosch for example, provide the electronic and controls of engines to much of the automotive industry. But before they manufacture these controls, they have to design the software prototype. The software prototype is important to try out things because there are so many variables that are possible on how to control the engine. This is also the case with the automotive sector. The trend is growing so rapidly that the company?s computational power is such that we are learning to simulate more and more things.

Recently a professor friend of mine mentioned that he was at the crossroads of creating a simulation model of the entire human brain and could have the first prototype ready by 2018. In a way, it is the chicken egg argument?we use software to design chips, that software runs the computers, and in these computers there are chips designed by our company. This is the centre of gravity of the history of hi-tech. Everything else is derived from that, we are privileged to be building.

The Indian government has unveiled their draft policy which has committed the electronic system design and manufacturing to be $400 billion by 2020.

What are your thoughts on this and how do you think India can achieve this ambitious target?

There is no question about the enormous potential of the electronic industry and it will grow substantially in India. This is mainly because electronics are fundamental part of the industry that drives productivity and hence it allows you to do things much more efficiently and effectively.

Second important aspect is the availability of indigenous talent pool that can grow quite rapidly because there are a lot of engineers coming out of schools and these local talents will continue to evolve technologies or adapt them as per the local needs. For example Aakash, this is at intersection of many high potential ideas. It will always be good to have home grown capability and home manufactured capability in the domain where many pads will be sold. That?s another wonderful idea where technology has a role to play in education.

How significant is the acquisition of Magma Design and what value it would bring to Synopsys?

We are still in the process of getting government approval, so it?s not a closed transaction yet. This is an interesting addition for us because we are in the midst of seeing yet another way of massive technology investment like the speed with which mobile communication has embraced telecom is amazing. We have a tremendous need for increasing and advancing our enhancements and Magma brings for us very competent engineers, technologies, products and also support engineers.

How important is India for Synopsys? What will be the company?s strategy to grow operations here?

There are two angles into that, one is from a customer point of view and the other from an employee point of view. On customer front, there are number of very significant international companies that have built very substantial R&D development centres here. In the initial days, these R&D centres were low-tech and then it became the testing of

designs and then chip design and now there are number of people doing state-of-the-art design here in India for a multinational at many locations.

We have around 1,000 people here and have a number of areas of specialisation. We recently got a company called nSys that brought us the fabulous team working on verification and intellectual property.

What are some of the key areas Synopsys is looking for acquisitions going forward?

At any point of time, we look at quite a number of areas in acquisitions. In our history, we have acquired around 60 companies and are reasonably more experienced. We mostly look around the general people theme technology but the technology itself can be in multiple directions.

As one of the founders of Synopsys, share with us some key milestones and the turning points.

Synopsys celebrated its 25th anniversary last year in December and I am proud to say that our tools have been at the heart of all high technology equipment since our

inception. People say that we were lucky as we did the right thing at the right time and in few years it revolutionised the way chip designing is done. During the first phase, the company was into synthesis, the technology we have pioneered and then came the next phase which was to grow on the portfolio of products.

After this, we connected with actual manufacturing. We can do all logic designing and also physical designing. So connecting with manufacturing required a number of big investment and acquisitions. In that context, we brought a company called Avanti, one of the largest acquisitions in the history of our field. After another important acquisition in the optical domain, we really became the leader of our industry and now we have to think not only about the well being of the company but also the health of the industry.