Industry Expert Blogs

Recently I attended CDNlive, the Cadence user conference, although this year with the subtitle “Realizing EDA360.” This time Cadence did a much better job than I’ve seen before of explaining what they are really thinking. Even John Bruggeman admitted that far too many people told him that they were well aware of EDA360, they just weren’t entirely sure what it was.

At its heart, EDA360 is an acknowledgement that creating a chip from scratch is no longer the heart of electronic system design. Cadence describes this as chip design driven by apps (in the iStore sense). But I think really it is an acknowledgement that Software, IP integration and IP quality are the heart of designing a system today. Cadence has done a loud job of articulating this vision but in fact they have been behind both Mentor and Synopsys in terms of execution. Mentor is the only EDA company with a foot in the embedded world, they have the most successful high level synthesis in Catapult, they have FPGA synthesis and PCB tools. Synopsys has acquired a whole portfolio of IP, most recently including Virage, along with 3 virtual platform companies (Virtio, VaST and CoWare), high level synthesis (Synfora) and FPGA synthesis (Synplicity) to go along with their existing products in the IP and system space. Cadence has a lot less, and acquiring Denali for a ridiculous price is just a small piece of a solution.

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