Cadence Design Systems

Cadence Design Systems, Inc., headquartered in San Jose, California, is an American multinational computational software 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 (SoCs) and printed circuit boards.
History.
Origins.
Cadence Design Systems began as an electronic design automation (EDA) company, formed by the 1988 merger of Solomon Design Automation (SDA), co-founded in 1983 by Richard Newton, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli and James Solomon, and ECAD, a public company co-founded by Glen Antle and Paul Huang in 1982. SDA's CEO Joseph Costello was appointed as CEO of the newly combined company.
Executive Leadership.
Following the resignation of Cadence's original CEO Joe Costello in 1997, Jack Harding was appointed CEO. Ray Bingham was named CEO in 1999. In 2004, Mike Fister became Cadence's new CEO.
In 2008, Cadence's board appointed Lip-Bu Tan as acting CEO, after the resignation of Mike Fister; Tan had served on the Cadence Board of Directors since 2004. In January 2009, the Cadence's board of directors voted unanimously to confirm Lip-Bu Tan as President and CEO. Tan had been most recently CEO of Walden International, a venture capital firm, where he remains chairman of the firm. In 2017, Cadence appointed Anirudh Devgan as president, reporting to Lip-Bu Tan.
Products.
The company develops software, hardware and intellectual properties (IP) used to design chips, systems and printed circuit boards, as well as IP covering interfaces, memory, analog, SoC peripherals, data plane processing units, and verification.
Digital Implementation & Sign-off Technologies.
Other Cadence RTL to GDS II tools: Conformal Equivalence Checker, Stratus High-Level Synthesis, Joules Power Analysis, Quantus RC Extraction, Modus AutomaticTest Pattern Generation.
Intellectual Property.
Design IP targeting areas including memory / storage / high-performance interface protocols (USB or PCIe controllers and PHYs), Tensilica DSP processors for audio, vision, wireless modems and convolutional neural nets. Tensilica DSP processors IP include:
Recognition.
In 2020, Fortune Magazine named Cadence to Fortune's "100 Best Companies to Work For list" for the sixth consecutive year.
Also in 2020, Cadence was ranked #45 in PEOPLE magazine’s Companies that Care.
In 2019, Investor's Business Daily ranked Cadence Design Systems #5 on its 50 Best Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Companies list.
In 2016, Cadence CEO Lip-Bu Tan was awarded the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award by the Global Semiconductor Alliance.
Acquisitions.
Timeline.
The company has also acquired High-Level Design (HLD), UniCAD, CadMOS, Ambit Design Systems, Simplex, Silicon Perspective, Plato, and Get2Chip.
Lawsuits.
Avanti Corporation.
From 1995 till 2002, Cadence was involved in a 6-year-long legal dispute with Avanti Corporation (brand name "Avant!"), 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.
Berkeley Design Automation.
In 2013, Cadence sued Berkeley Design Automation (BDA) for circumvention of a license scheme to link its Analog FastSpice (AFS) simulator to Cadence's Analog Design Environment (Virtuoso ADE).
The lawsuit was settled less than one year later with an undisclosed payment of BDA and a multi-year agreement to support interoperability of AFS with ADE through Cadence’s official interface. BDA was bought by Mentor Graphics a few months later.