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System on Chip design resources
System on Chip design resources
July 13, 2026 -
On the one hand, I think I’m taking the incredible advances we’re currently seeing in Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools in my stride, striving to maintain a dignified persona as the latest and greatest marvels unfold before my eyes. On the other hand, I sometimes find it hard to restrain myself from exclaiming, “Wow!” or “You must be joking!”
Before we plunge headfirst into the topic of Agentic AI Super-Agents, however, I feel that a little background may help to set the scene (feel free to skip directly to the “Introducing Agentic AI Super-Agents” section if you don’t mind hurting my feelings).
I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I hail from the days when we designed ASICs by hand at the gate/register level using pencil and paper. Commercial digital design tools really didn’t start to enter the mainstream until the very early 1980s. At that time, these tools were broadly split into CAD (Computer-Aided Design) and CAE (Computer-Aided Engineering). Somewhat counterintuitively, CAE tools focused on tasks such as simulation, analysis, and verification, while CAD tools focused on implementation tasks like schematic capture and IC/PCB layout.
As the industry evolved and expanded, CAD and CAE capabilities gradually came to be gathered under the umbrella term Electronic Design Automation (EDA). The history of all this is quite interesting because there are two main eras: The classical CAD/CAE DMV era (Daisy, Mentor, and Valid) and the modern EDA era (Cadence, Mentor [now Siemens EDA], and Synopsys).
The “Big Three” of the early 1980s were collectively known as DMV: Daisy Systems, Mentor Graphics, and Valid Logic Systems, all of which were founded in 1981. At that time, you didn’t just buy software; instead, you bought an entire workstation dedicated to chip and/or PCB designs. These companies sold complete packages comprising hardware, operating system, graphics, and CAD/CAE software.
Then Cadence arrived on the scene…
Unlike its predecessors, Cadence didn’t start from scratch. Instead, it was created in 1988 by the merger of ECAD (founded in 1982) and SDA Systems (founded in 1983). The merged company became Cadence Design Systems. Unlike DMV, Cadence was largely a software company, riding the industry’s shift away from proprietary workstations toward standard engineering workstations from companies such as Sun, HP, and Apollo.
By the late 1980s, the business model of selling proprietary hardware was becoming a liability. Mentor survived because it had bet early on commercial workstations instead of proprietary hardware. Daisy merged with Cadnetix in 1988, struggled, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1990, and was acquired by Intergraph. Valid stayed independent a little longer but was acquired by Cadence in 1991. Cadence’s acquisition of Valid made it the largest EDA company by revenue, overtaking Mentor. Around the same time, Synopsys was emerging as a leader in logic synthesis, helping to define the modern EDA landscape.