DAC retrospective

By _EDA Graffiti

June 23, 2010

So what was the theme of DAC this year? Two things stood out for me: one is that the big EDA companies are getting serious about doing design at a higher level. I think we need a new name for this since ESL tends to focus on IC design, whereas the underlying message is that moving to the higher level is about designing electronic systems including their software, not largely about chip design.Mentor has had a portfolio in this area for years. Synopsys has been vacuuming up companies at this level: VaST, CoWare, Synfora, Virage.

Cadence has put their EDA360 stake in the ground and also acquired Denali. I think the price is insane. John Bruggeman asked me whether I thought Virage or Denali was the better buy and I had to say Virage. I find it hard to believe that there is a huge untapped reservoir of demand for Denali’s products that the Cadence sales-force will unlock whereas I think the Virage product line can be leveraged by the Synopsys salesforce, especially given the rest of their IP portfolio. The interesting thing about the Virage acquisition is what, if anything, it does to affect their relationship with ARM since it now puts them squarely in competition with ARM for the old Artisan part of their product line, and, with ARC, at least obliquely in competition with them in the microprocessor space. But they both need each other so they probably just have to live with it.

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