Limits of IP block strategy exposed

Santa Cruz, Calif. — The lesson of Barcelona Design Inc., the analog automation pioneer now disbanding, is that good technology and plenty of venture money won't save a company with an unclear business model and overly ambitious goals.
But at a deeper level, Barcelona's failure also calls into question the idea of building a company around analog intellectual property (IP). Barcelona's vision was one in which system-on-chip designers would buy or synthesize large analog IP blocks and plug them into complex mixed-signal designs as easily as they might put analog devices onto a pc board.
"It's a sad tale of how great technology can go wrong," said Joseph Costello, chairman of Barcelona and the former chief executive officer of Cadence Design Systems Inc. Costello recently confirmed that Barcelona, which had garnered about $44 million in venture capital funding, is winding down its operations and seeking a buyer for its technology.
In the wake of the Barcelona experiment, observers said that analog IP must be offered within the context of a broader solution that includes tools, services and lots of support. Most analog IP development remains in-house at large companies, and a lot of analog functionality is still going off-chip.
"I think if someone figures out a way to deliver soft [analog] IP that is easily customizable and can be ported quickly, there would be a market for those soft-IP blocks," said co-founder Mar Hershenson, who left Barcelona in 2003 for "work and personal" reasons and is now involved with an unidentified startup. Hershenson, who also teaches part-time at Stanford University, said she was unsure why Barcelona failed. But she noted that hard IP is difficult to reuse because "the specs change and processes change so often."
"The problem at Barcelona is that they often looked more like a business school experiment rather than a company," said Gary Smith, chief EDA analyst at Gartner Dataquest. Nevertheless, in Smith's view, Hershenson "still stands out as one of the best minds in analog automation." As a Stanford graduate student, she did groundbreaking work in nonlinear convex optimization and its impact on automating analog design.
"Barcelona had the potential to be the catalyst in developing a true RT [register-transfer] flow for analog design," Smith said. "The analog EDA market is still struggling, and there is no one around to match Mar and her vision."
Founded in 1999 by Hershenson and Stanford professor Stephen Boyd, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company claimed breakthrough analog synthesis technology and pioneered a Web-based pay-per-use model. Customers were to license Barcelona's IP along with its synthesis tool, then use the tool to optimize circuits for a specific process.
Some big names in electronic design automation saw good potential there. Besides Costello, Barcelona claimed backing from Robert Dobkin, Linear Technology's CTO; Abbas El Gamal, founder of Actel and Silicon Architects; and Buno Pati, former CEO at Numerical Technologies.
But even "wonderful new technologies can screw up, even with all kinds of luminaries to guide [them]," Costello said. One problem from the outset, he noted, was that the Barcelona team didn't have much EDA or semiconductor industry experience. That's not something that can be supplied at the corporate-board level.
Barcelona had some initial success with op amps, but that wasn't a big enough business, Costello said. So it started chasing the holy grail of large IP blocks, such as phase-locked loops and A/D and D/A converters. "No one had ever done compilers for blocks of that size," he said.
But those large IP blocks were complicated to build, Costello noted, given the need to crank out "tons of variations" for different processes. And there wasn't as much of a market as the company had hoped. "It was more or less a service and consulting type of business, and it was a niche," he said.
Last June, Barcelona announced that it was swapping its IP-based model for a more conventional EDA licensing scheme. As the focus shifted back to the company's equation-based synthesis tools, Barcelona cut its 60-some staff roughly in half. But Costello said that the switch to an EDA model never really happened.
Instead, he said, Barcelona started looking at ways to extend its analog compiler technology into the digital domain. When it became clear there was no "quick hit," the board decided to call it quits.