Cadence Design Systems

Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
Type	Public
Founded	1988
Headquarters	San Jose, California
Key people	Mike Fister, President/CEO
Industry	Software & Programming
Revenue	1.48 billion USD (2006)
Net income	$142 million USD (2006)
Employees	5,200 (2006) [1]
Website	www.cadence.com

Cadence Design Systems, Inc (NASDAQ: CDNS) 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

Building 2 (pictured) is rather representative of the low-rise Cadence campus in San Jose.

Cadence, headquartered in San Jose, California, is a large^[2] (currently the largest) supplier of electronic design technologies and engineering services. The primary corporate product is software used to design chips^[3] and printed circuit boards^[4]. 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

The Cadence logo in front of Building 1 on the San Jose campus at night.

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^[5]; 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. ^[6].
• 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^[7]
• 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^[8].
• OrCad/Pspice - Tools for for smaller design teams and individual PCB designers^[9].

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^[10] 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"^[10]. The Avanti executives eventually pled 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^[11]. The case resulted in a number of legal precedents^[12]. The Cadence group Quickturn was also involved in an unusual series of legal events with Mentor Graphics/Aptix^[13]. 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^[14]. 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^[15], and convicted anyway^[16]. According to the lawyers concerned^[13], the original notebooks were not needed for the trial. The patent filing date, which was not in dispute, would have sufficed.

Acquisitions and mergers

Cadence has been involved with many mergers and acquisitions^[17]. 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:

• 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.

References

1. ^ Cadence Company Overview
2. ^ List of top 25 software companies
3. ^ Design on Diagonal Path in Pursuit of a Faster Chip, John Markoff, New York Times, February 26, 2007
4. ^ Cadence Acquires Software Company, New York Times, April 11, 1990. Article describes Cadence acquiring a printed circuit design software company.
5. ^ Course description from University of Colorado
6. ^ Tutorial from MIT course
7. ^ UNIX Software and CAD tools. Carleton University.
8. ^ Ibid
9. ^ Ibid
10. ^ ^{a b} >Business Week overview of the entire case, after the criminal trial but before the purchase by Synopsys.
11. ^ EEDesign article about the final settlement.
12. ^ Cadence v. Avant!: The UTSA and California Trade Secret Law, Danley, J., Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 2004, Vol 19; Part 1, pages 289-308
13. ^ ^{a b} Blind Spots, from IP Law and Business
14. ^ In Courts, Threats Become Alarming Fact of Life, Deborah Sontag, New York Times, 20 March 2005
15. ^ Odd legal saga takes an ugly turn, Richard Goering, EE Times, 02 August 2004
16. ^ Jury finds Mohsen guilty of perjury, obstruction of justice, Dylan McGrath, EE Times, 28 Feb 2006
17. ^ Specialized Software Maker Is Said to Be in Buyout Talks, Andrew Ross Sorkin and Michael J. de la Merced, New York Times, Published: June 4, 2007

External links

• Official site
• Connections Program
• comp.cad.cadence (newsgroup)
• [1] (Usergroup)