Cadence Design Systems Totally Explained

Everything about Cadence Design Systems totally explained

Cadence Design Systems, Inc is an electronic design automation (EDA) software and engineering services company, founded in 1988 by the merger of SDA Systems and ECAD, Inc. For years it has been the largest company in the EDA industry. The name is pronounced with the stress on the first syllable.

Overview

Cadence, headquartered in San Jose, California, is a large (currently the largest) supplier of electronic design technologies and engineering services. The primary corporate product is software used to design chips and printed circuit boards.
Cadence employs approximately 5,200 people and reported 2006 revenues of approximately $1.48 billion. As of 2007, Cadence's major competitors are Synopsys, Mentor Graphics and Magma Design Automation.
Since May 2004, Michael Fister

has served as President and CEO of the company. Dr. John Shoven was elected Chairman of the board in July 2005. He replaced the retiring Ray Bingham.

Products

Cadence's product offerings are targeted at various types of design and verification tasks which include:

Virtuoso Platform - Tools for designing full-custom integrated circuits; includes schematic entry, behavioral modeling (Verilog-AMS), circuit simulation, full custom layout, physical verification, extraction and back-annotation. Used mainly for analog, mixed-signal, RF, and standard-cell designs, but also memory and FPGA designs.
Encounter Platform - Tools for creation of digital integrated circuits. This includes floorplanning, synthesis, test, and place and route. Typically a digital design starts from Verilog netlists. .
Incisive Platform - Tools for simulation and functional verification of RTL including Verilog, VHDL and SystemC based models. Includes formal verification, formal equivalence checking, hardware acceleration, and emulation
Verification IP (VIP) for complex protocols including PCI Express, AMBA, USB, SATA, OCP and others.
Allegro Platform - Tools for co-design of integrated circuits, packages, and PCBs.
OrCad/Pspice - Tools for for smaller design teams and individual PCB designers.

In addition to EDA software, Cadence provides contracted methodology and design services as well as silicon design IP

, and has a program

to make it easier for other EDA software to interoperate with the company's tools.

Lawsuits with Avant! and Mentor/Aptix

Cadence, as a large public company, has been involved in a number of legal disputes. Two in particular are notable:
Cadence was involved in a long running (6 years) legal dispute with Avanti Corporation, in which Cadence claimed Avant! stole Cadence code, and Avant! denied it. According to Business Week "The Avant! case is probably the most dramatic tale of white-collar crime in the history of Silicon Valley". The case resulted in a number of legal precedents.
The Cadence group Quickturn was also involved in an unusual series of legal events with Mentor Graphics/Aptix. Mentor purchased rights to an Aptix patent, then sued Cadence. In this case, the CEO of Aptix, Amr Mohsen, forged a notebook in order to make the patent case stronger. When suspicions were raised, he staged a break-in of his own car to get rid of the evidence, resulting in charges of obstruction of justice. Trying to avoid this, he attempted to flee the country, only to be caught with an illegal passport and a pile of cash. While in jail for this offense, he was recorded offering money to intimidate witnesses and kill the judge. In order to fight these charges, he tried to show psychological problems, but left a trail of evidence of his research into this defense, and how it might be done. He was charged with attempting to delay a federal trial by feigning incompetency, and convicted anyway. According to the lawyers concerned. Some of the larger examples of companies merged in or acquired are: Valid Logic Systems, High Level Design (HLD), Cooper and Chyan (CCT), Quickturn, CadMOS, Simplex, Silicon Perspective, Plato, Get2Chip and Verplex Systems. The latest major activity is:

March 11, 2008: acquired ChipEstimate, a developer of IC planning and IP reuse management tools.

August 15, 2007: acquired Clearshape, a developer of Design for Manufacturability (DFM) technology.

July 12, 2007: acquired Invarium, a photolithography specialist.

April 7, 2005: acquired Verisity, Ltd., a provider of verification process automation solutions ($315 mln., all-cash).

April 6, 2004: acquired Neolinear Technology, a privately held company specializing in rapid analog design technology

September 2003: acquired Verplex Systems, a provider of Formal Verification products, Conformal Solutions and Blacktie Property Checker.

May 1997: acquired Cooper & Chyan Technology, a provider of PCB and IC automatic place and router software solutions.

Notable persons

Joseph Costello, CEO, 1988–1997.

Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, co-founder.

Amr Mohsen - Creator of Patents which Cadence Design Systems was accused of infringing upon.Further Information

Get more info on 'Cadence Design Systems'.

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