Cadence Design Systems

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Cadence Design Systems, Inc.

Type	Public
Founded	1987
Headquarters	San Jose, California
Key people	Michael Fister, President/CEO Dr. John Shoven, Chairman
Industry	Software & Programming
Revenue	$1.48 billion USD (2006)
Net income	$142.17 million USD (2006)
Employees	5,100 (2006)
Website	www.cadence.com

Cadence Design Systems, Inc (NASDAQ: CDNS) is an electronic design automation (EDA) software and engineering services company, founded in 1987 by the merger of SDA Systems and ECAD, Inc..

1 Overview
2 Products
3 Connections Program
4 Acquisitions and mergers
5 Notable persons
6 External links

[edit] Overview

Cadence is the world's largest supplier of electronic design technologies and engineering services. Cadence products and services are used to accelerate and manage the design of semiconductor devices, computer systems, networking equipment, telecommunications equipment, consumer electronics, and other electronics based products. The primary corporate product is software used to design chips and printed circuit boards. Cadence employs approximately 5,100 people and reported 2006 revenues of approximately $1.48 billion. Cadence has sales offices, design centers, and research facilities around the world. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California, and trades on Nasdaq under the symbol CDNS.

As of 2006, Cadence's major competitors are Synopsys, Mentor Graphics, and Magma Design Automation.

Since May, 2004, Michael Fister has served as President and CEO of the company. Dr. John Shoven was elected Chairman of the board in July, 2005. He replaced the retiring Ray Bingham.

[edit] Products

Cadence's EDA products span the entire product development process including; system design, simulation, logic synthesis, and layout of integrated circuits. In addition, the company has other related products, including tools for integrated circuit packaging and PCB design. Cadence's product offerings are organized around "platforms" targeted at various types of design tasks which include:

Virtuoso Custom Design, a suite of programs for designing full-custom integrated circuits; includes schematic entry, circuit simulation, full custom layout, physical verification and extraction. Used mainly for analog, mixed-signal, RF, and standard-cell designs, but also memory and FPGA designs.
Encounter Digital IC, includes floorplanning, synthesis, test, and place and route-tools for creation of digital integrated circuits. Typically a digital design starts from Verilog netlists.
Incisive Functional Verification, includes tools for simulation and functional verification of Verilog, VHDL, and SystemC netlists. Includes formal verification, formal equivalence checking, hardware acceleration, and emulation.
Allegro IC-PKG-PCB co-design, includes tools for co-design of integrated circuits, packages, and PCBs.
Orcad, includes Cadence OrCAD personal productivity tools (including PSpice®) It is designed to boost productivity for smaller design teams and individual PCB designers, OrCAD PCB design suites grow with your needs and technology challenges. This line of tools is easily scalable with the full complement of Cadence Allegro PCB solutions.

Specman. An HDL verification tool suite.

In addition to EDA software, Cadence provides contracted methodology and design services as well as silicon design IP for customer who are seeking to augment their existing design capabilities and/or minimize risk.

[edit] Connections Program

Cadence offers other EDA companies the opportunity to interface their tools with Cadence's via the Connections Program.

[edit] Acquisitions and mergers

Cadence has been involved with many mergers and acquisitions. Some of the larger examples of companies merged in or acquired are: Valid Logic Systems, High Level Design (HLD), Cooper and Chyan (CCT), Quickturn, CadMOS, Simplex, Silicon Perspective, Plato, Get2Chip and Verplex Systems. The latest major activity is:

April 7, 2005: acquired Verisity, Ltd., a provider of verification process automation solutions ($315 mln., all-cash).
April 6, 2004: acquired Neolinear Technology, a privateley held company specializing in rapid analog design technology
September, 2003: acquired Verplex Systems, a provider of Formal Verification products, Conformal Solutions and Blacktie Property Checker.
May, 1997: acquired Cooper & Chyan Technology, a provider of PCB and IC automatic place and router software solutions.