EDA Roundup: Big Four Have Stabilized

The EDA players believe that the current year will bring growth for their industry. According to Snyopsys’ management, the outlook for semiconductors is at upper-single-digit growth this year. Industry analysts also expect a CAGR of 9%-11% over the next five years. Besides growth, the industry also believes that the “time-to-market” pressure is back on account of the

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Cadence Takes a Page Out of Microsoft’s Playbook

With the Microsoft-Yahoo! drama fresh on everyone’s mind, Mike Fister and the Cadence board have finally done something that shows a bit of boldness, some imagination, and possibly some courage. Cadence has made a hostile takeover bid for Mentor Graphics.

Will Magma Die on the Vine?

Magma Design Automation, Inc. (LAVA) provides electronic design automation software products and related services, and is our fourth and final company in the EDA review. In February 2007 I reviewed Magma and noted they were a potential acquisition target given their legal problems in a losing patent fight with Synopsys. I pondered on the possibility

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Synopsys Looks Healthy, But

In our EDA review, Synopsys (Nasdaq: SNPS) is the second major player, always going neck-to-neck with Cadence. Synopsys announced Q4 earnings on December 6, 2007. Unlike the losses posted by competitor Mentor, Synopsys executives were quite pleased with their results and momentum throughout the year enabling Synopsys to meet or exceed all of their original

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Cadence: Buyout Rumors Persist

I have regularly commented on the EDA industry and discussed specific companies in the past, including Cadence, Mentor, Magma, and Synopsys. Today I come back to look at Cadence again, and examine what has changed since. During the summer Cadence (CDNS) was rumored to be in buyout discussions with Blackstone and KKR, which I said

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Is Cadence Growing at the Expense of Magma?

I have written extensively about the structural dysfuctions of the EDA industry in Future of EDA, Future of EDA: Addendum. The only two growth areas in the EDA market are Design for Manufacturability / Yield (DFM / DFY) and the pre-synthesis part of the flow that includes system-level design, hardware-software codesign, and prototyping. It turns

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Future of EDA: Addendum

Recently, Gartner fired their EDA research team, part and parcel, with veteran analysts Gary Smith and Daya Nadamuni. Here’s John Cooley’s report on the departure with comments from many industry stalwarts. This takes out the last remaining independent analyst that covered EDA as an industry. There is a problem in EDA. Small $4 Billion market

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RTL Hand-off & Predictive Prototyping

RTL Prototypng and Hand-off is a big problem. Who will eventually solve it?