The well-known saying, 'time is money,' is nowhere more true than in the world of electronics. As the pace of this industry continues to increase, seemingly with each new semiconductor process node, the time to market requirements gets shorter and shorter. But at the same time the cost of design has skyrocketed. If you look at the entire design process a few things become clear. First is that the major cost is in the design team itself. Most design teams stay intact for the entire design process. The second is that the cost of design tools is lunch money. One week of design cost will buy all of the tools generally needed for a design team. However these tools need to continually increase the amount of gates they can process and they must continue to increase their speed of execution. That's where parallel processing comes in. The tool that can incorporate these two improvements wins in the EDA marketplace. In order to do this you must develop superior parallel algorithms. That puts parallel computing at the heart of keeping design costs under control. ROI (return on investment) analysis has its place but when you are talking about an inflection point, and parallel computing is an inflection point, ROI analysis misses the point. Today parallel computing is the ticket into the game. Without it you don??t get to play in today's semiconductor design marketplace.