Cadence Design Systems


Cadence Design Systems, Inc., headquartered in San Jose, California, in the North San Jose Innovation District, is an American multinational electronic design automation software and engineering services company, founded in 1988 by the merger of SDA Systems and ECAD, Inc. The company produces software, hardware and silicon structures for designing integrated circuits, systems on chips and printed circuit boards.

History

Cadence Design Systems was the result of a merger in 1988 of Solomon Design Automation, co-founded in 1983 by Richard Newton, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli and James Solomon, and ECAD, co-founded by Glen Antle and Paul Huang in 1982. Joseph Costello was appointed as CEO from 1988–1997, and Cadence became the largest EDA company during his tenure.
Following Costello as CEO were Jack Harding, Ray Bingham, and Mike Fister. Following the resignation of Fister, the board appointed Lip-Bu Tan as acting CEO. In January 2009, the company confirmed Lip-Bu Tan as President and CEO. Tan had been most recently CEO of Walden International, a venture capital firm, and remains chairman of the firm. He has served on the Cadence Board of Directors since 2004, where he served on the Technology Committee for four years.
In November 2007 Cadence was named one of the "50 Best Places to Work in Silicon Valley" by San Jose Magazine.
Cadence has been named to the Fortune Magazine 100 Best Companies to Work For list 6 years in a row, including in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.
In 2016, Cadence CEO Lip-Bu Tan was awarded the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award by the Global Semiconductor Alliance.
According to Glassdoor, it is the fifth highest-paying company for employees in the United States as of 2017.
In November 2017, Cadence appointed Anirudh Devgan as president.
In 2018, Cadence celebrated its 30th anniversary.
In December 2019, Investor’s Business Daily ranked Cadence Design Systems #5 on its 50 Best Environmental, Social, and Governance Companies list.
In 2019, Cadence was ranked #45 in PEOPLE magazine’s Companies that Care. 
As of 2020, Cadence has a global employee count of over 8,100 and reported $2.336 billion in revenue in 2019.

Products

The company develops software, hardware and intellectual properties used to design chips, intelligent systems and printed circuit boards, as well as IP covering interfaces, memory, analog, SoC peripherals, data plane processing units, and verification.
Cadence products primarily target SoC design engineers and are used to move a design into packaged silicon, with products for custom and analog design, digital design, mixed-signal design, verification, and package/PCB design, as well as a broad selection of IP, and also hardware for emulation and FPGA prototyping. These products allow for broader system design, from the software down to the physical chip design.
It provides solutions that encompass design IP, timing analysis and signoff, services, and tools and methodologies. In addition, it provides system analysis solutions for electromagnetic, electronics, thermal and electromechanical simulation. The company also provides products that assist with the development of complete hardware and software platforms that support end applications.
Cadence's product offerings include:
In addition to EDA software, Cadence provides contracted methodology and design services as well as silicon design IP, and has a program aimed at making it easier for other EDA software to interoperate with the company's tools.

Lawsuits

Avanti Corporation

Cadence was involved in a 6-year-long legal dispute with Avanti Corporation, in which Cadence claimed Avanti stole Cadence code, and Avanti denied it. According to Business Week "The Avanti case is probably the most dramatic tale of white-collar crime in the history of Silicon Valley". The Avanti executives eventually pleaded no contest and Cadence received several hundred million dollars in restitution. Avanti was then purchased by Synopsys, which paid $265 million more to settle the remaining claims. The case resulted in a number of legal precedents.

Aptix Corporation

Quickturn Design Systems, a company acquired by Cadence, was involved in a series of legal events with Aptix Corporation. Aptix licensed a patent to Mentor Graphics and the two companies jointly sued Quickturn over an alleged patent infringement. Amr Mohsen, CEO of Aptix, forged and tampered with legal evidence and was subsequently charged with conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice. Mohsen was arrested after violating his bail agreement by attempting to flee the country. While in jail, Mohsen plotted to intimidate witnesses and kill the federal judge presiding over his case. Mohsen was further charged with attempting to delay a federal trial by feigning incompetency. Due to the overwhelming misconduct, the judge ruled the lawsuit as unenforceable and Mohsen was sentenced to 17 years in prison. Mentor Graphics subsequently sued Aptix to recoup legal costs. Cadence also sued Mentor Graphics and Aptix to recover legal costs.

Acquisitions

Timeline

The company has also acquired Valid Logic Systems, High Level Design, UniCAD, CadMOS, Ambit Design Systems, Simplex, Silicon Perspective, Plato and Get2Chip.

Denali Software

Denali Software, Inc. was an American software company, based in Sunnyvale, California, now acquired by Cadence. The company produces electronic design automation software, intellectual property and design cores and platforms for memory, other standard interfaces and system-on-chip design and verification. It has its engineering offices in Sunnyvale, Austin and Bangalore. Incorporated in 1996, Denali is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and serves the global electronics industry with direct sales and support offices in North America, Europe, Japan and Asia.
On May 2010, Cadence Design Systems announced that it would acquire Denali for $315 million.

Valid Logic Systems

Valid Logic Systems was one of the first commercial electronic design automation companies, now acquired by Cadence. It was founded in the early 1980s, along with Daisy Systems Corporation and Mentor Graphics, collectively known as DMV. The engineering founders were L. Curtis Widdoes, Tom McWilliams and Jeff Rubin, all of whom had worked on the S-1 supercomputer project at Livermore Labs.
Valid acquired several companies such as Telesis, Analog Design Tools, and Calma. In turn, Valid was acquired by Cadence Design Systems in the early 90s.
Valid built both hardware and software, for schematic capture, logic simulation, static timing analysis, and packaging. Much of the initial software base derived from SCALD, a set of tools developed to support the design of the S-1 supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Later, Valid expanded into IC design tools and into printed circuit board layout.
At first, Valid ran schematic capture on a proprietary UNIX workstation, the SCALDSystem, with static timing analysis, simulation, and packaging running on a VAX or IBM-compatible mainframe. However, by the mid-1980s, general purpose workstations were powerful enough, and significantly cheaper. Companies such as Mentor Graphics and Cadence Design Systems sold software only for such workstations. By 1990, almost all Valid software was also running on workstations, primarily those from Sun Microsystems.

Notable persons