A Brief History of Cadence: The Solomon-Costello Era

By Cadence

March 16, 2016

Cadence has grown from a small startup to a $1.7B corporation. Its history includes companies that have come under the Cadence fold, to help drive Cadence's growth in those early days and also provide underpinning key technologies that the company continues to advance and ship today.

The story starts when Jim Solomon left National Semiconductor, where he was director of IC design for analog and mixed-signal, to found SDA (which, depending on who you talk to, either stands for Solomon Design Automation or Silicon Design Automation). It was based in Silicon Valley. He funded the company, half coming from VCs and half from four companies (including his former employer), getting them to provide an investment in return for being able to send two engineers to work there and access to the software that resulted. At the time there wasn't really an EDA industry and top-tier semiconductor companies developed their own tools, leaving companies that had fewer resources without many good options. In that era, funding a company for access to design tools was attractive. In 1987, SDA filed to go public but, unfortunately, the day that their initial public offering (IPO) was to take place turned out to be "black Monday," the biggest one-day fall in the stock market ever. So the IPO never took place.

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