editor's blog
Subscribe Now

Starting from Scratch

In this “advanced” age of EDA, it’s not uncommon for new point tools to come along, improving some bottleneck in an otherwise reasonably well-established tool chain. What’s less common is for an entire new tool flow to emerge. And it’s even less common yet for one to emerge all from a single company. And a small one, no less.

And yet that’s what’s happened recently in the analog/custom world. Vivid Engineering, at its roots a design services house, has launched Symica (they haven’t decided whether it’s “S?-mi-ca” or “S?-mi-ca… my vote is for the former…), an end-to-end suite of tools including

– a design environment

– a schematic editor

– a SPICE simulator

– a waveform viewer

– a layout editor

– a PDK creation tool

– a SKILL translator

They can also connect into other flows for logic synthesis or automated place-and-route.

The obvious question is, wow, why do we need a complete new set of all of these? And their answer is that freelancers and small companies need access to inexpensive tools. From Vivid’s standpoint, there’s not a lot of choice out there, and what exists is expensive. In fact, they even claim that, for cost reasons, some designers are doing chip design using PCB layout tools like OrCAD.

To address this, their full-up package (including digital simulation interface) is $5300 for a perpetual floating node. (The PDK creator and SKILL translator are sold separately.)

Needless to say, a price like that will not subsidize the smooth-talking, swanky sales guy in the spiffy suit that typically accompanies an EDA tool sale. This is web-based selling. They do have live support by phone or email.

This was an organic development, self-funded (and, something that is probably helping them sleep nights, they’re not actively looking for investors). They’ve actually used proprietary formats for their files; they claim that OpenAccess isn’t, in fact, very open. Or at least not well-documented – it wasn’t possible for them to work with that format, at least not at this point.

More info in their release

Leave a Reply

featured blogs
Jul 25, 2025
Manufacturers cover themselves by saying 'Contents may settle' in fine print on the package, to which I reply, 'Pull the other one'”it's got bells on it!'...

featured paper

Agilex™ 3 vs. Certus-N2 Devices: Head-to-Head Benchmarking on 10 OpenCores Designs

Sponsored by Altera

Explore how Agilex™ 3 FPGAs deliver up to 2.4× higher performance and 30% lower power than comparable low-cost FPGAs in embedded applications. This white paper benchmarks real workloads, highlights key architectural advantages, and shows how Agilex 3 enables efficient AI, vision, and control systems with headroom to scale.

Click to read more

featured chalk talk

Qorvo Accelerating Matter Product Development with Qorvo QPG6200
Sponsored by Mouser Electronics and Qorvo
In this episode of Chalk Talk, Tim Allemeersch from Qorvo and Amelia Dalton explore the challenges of Matter application development and how Qorvo can help you navigate the landscape of Matter development. They also investigate the benefits of Qorvo’s QPG6200 IC and how you can get started using this integrated circuit for your next Matter design.
Jul 16, 2025
10,434 views