Intel Capital today announced a $300 million Ultrabook™ Fund to help drive innovation in this new category of devices. As announced at Computex earlier this year, Ultrabook systems will marry the performance and capabilities of today’s laptops with tablet-like features. Ultrabook devices will deliver a highly responsive and secure experience in a thin, light and elegant design at mainstream prices.

"Ultrabook devices are poised to be an important area for innovation in the $261 billion global computer industry," said Arvind Sodhani, president of Intel Capital and Intel executive vice president. "The Intel Capital Ultrabook fund will focus on investing in companies building technologies that will help revolutionize the computing experience and morph today's mobile computers into the next 'must have' device."

This is an important opportunity for EDA companies as well as a clear example of proper marketing, something EDA needs to foster. Intel is not turning into a venture capitalist because it is fun or promises extraordinary returns. It does so to foster opportunities to sell its core products in larger volume and at a higher price point. Thus, the bottom line is that through this fund Intel aims to create a market, or at least make the market larger and more active than what it would have been otherwise.

EDA companies, especially the big three, must understand that expanding the number of OEMs using leading edge processes can be achieved not just by developing and marketing tools appropriate to the processes, but also by providing new and creative ways in which such processes can be used by an OEM in a less risky and cheaper way. We still focus of those designers that we have labeled "fighter pilots", those few that can deal with the ever growing complexity of leading edge design. Doing so is bound to decrease the number of customers in the market, shedding a few companies with every node.
The result will be that soon there will be a dozen customers left: six foundries, and six OEM, some of which are also foundries, like Intel and IBM, capable of profitably use 14nm and below process nodes.

EDA continues to produce tools to lower development costs, but manufacturing costs are increasing as well, and very little is being done about this segment of the market by our industry. What is the real impact, for example, of lowering development costs from $100 million to $80 million, a significant percentage decrease, when manufacturing costs still require a company to sell over a million units in order to recover its investment?

It is time to expand our creativity to tackle related problems, or we will loose the market to a new, growing, technological industry.