EDA’s acquisition era arrived close on the heels of the EDA era. SDA merged with ECAD to form Cadence in 1987, and the new company’s first acquisition was in 1989. The company has made nearly 40 acquisitions to date. Synopsys incorporated in 1986, and its first acquisition was in 1990. The company has made more than 100 acquisitions to date. Mentor Graphics metamorphosed from a dying CAE company into a vibrant EDA company around 1993, and its first post-metamorphosis acquisition was in 1997. The company made at least 15 acquisitions before being acquired itself in 2017 by Siemens. All three of these leading EDA companies … Read More → "A Brief and Personal History of EDA, Part 5: The Acquisition Era"

Rising complexity drove the creation of ever-more-powerful tools for electronic design. When circuit board and IC layouts escaped the bounds of pencil, paper, and manual dexterity, CAD tools from Applicon, Calma, and Computervision appeared. When polygon representations no longer sufficed as the first gate arrays appeared, CAE tools from Daisy, Mentor, and Valid appeared. These CAE companies attempted to provide all-in-one design suites for ICs and circuit boards. However, Moore’s Law drove IC complexity far beyond the abilities of these CAE design tool suites. More complex ICs demanded even more refined tools for logic simulation, timing … Read More → "A Brief and Personal History of EDA, Part 4: Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor Graphics – The EDA Era"

By the end of the 1970s, the leading CAD companies, including Calma, Applicon, and Computervision had started to lose interest in the electronics market and turned to mechanical CAD. Quite possibly, this lack of interest reflected the demand by electronics and semiconductor companies for something more than efficient drafting systems. The drawings produced by CAD systems were fully capable of producing photomasks for circuit boards and ICs, but these systems understood polygons. They had no comprehension of the electronics these polygons represented. CAD systems might know the difference between a 14- and a 40-pin DIP, but they … Read More → "A Brief and Personal History of EDA, Part 3: Daisy, Valid, and Mentor Graphics – The CAE Era"

Commercial EDA companies started to appear in the 1960s, and a trend of sorts was set. In each new, more advanced generation of EDA tools, three companies tended to dominate. The first EDA generation was the era of digitization. Computers and digitizers started to displace drafting tables and mechanical drafting machines in all engineering disciplines including electrical and electronic engineering. The dominant EDA trio in this CAD (Computer Aided Design or Computer Aided Drafting) era consisted of Calma, Computervision, and Applicon.

Before delving into the history of these three pioneering companies, it’s … Read More → "A Brief and Personal History of EDA, Part 2: Calma, Applicon, Computervision, and the CAD Era"

I can tell you from the start, it’s impossible to capture a comprehensive history of the EDA industry in a few articles. However, I can’t find any sort of comprehensive history for the industry, so I’ve used multiple sources plus my own experience working for many EDA and EDA-related companies and covering the EDA industry as an editor to create this 8-part article series. Someday, someone will write an entire book on the EDA industry’s history. For now, I offer this article series, written from a personal perspective.

Read More → "A Brief and Personal History of EDA, Part 1: DAC and the Big Bang"