For the last two decades or so, the EDA industry has grown at the same rate as the overall semiconductor industry. Mentor Graphics CEO Wally Rhines explained the situation to Magdy Abadir in the January/February 2017 edition of IEEE Design and Test magazine:

“EDA revenue is very stable at 2% of semiconductor revenue, and if the semiconductor industry doesn’t grow, it’s difficult for the IC design-related parts of the EDA industry to grow. …Historically, EDA grew much faster than the semiconductor industry because not everyone had adopted automation, so we … Read More → "A Brief and Personal History of EDA Part 8: The Big DA Era"

The first six articles in this series described the history of the EDA industry from its earliest beginnings to becoming the multi-billion-dollar heart of the semiconductor industry. Starting with one-off tools developed by various systems companies for their R&D departments developing circuit boards and ICs, the commercial EDA industry was ignited by the spark that was the Design Automation Conference. It then progressed through various phases starting with CAD companies, CAE companies, and EDA companies. The evolved EDA companies grew through acquisition, and when there were very few small EDA startups left to gobble up, … Read More → "A Brief and Personal History of EDA Part 7: EDA’s 60-Layer Cake"

The Mead-Conway methodology for designing VLSI ICs triggered the development of three dominant CAE companies – Daisy, Mentor Graphics, and Valid – which in turn led to the later development of the three dominant EDA companies – Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor Graphics. These histories appear in Parts 3 and 4 of this article series. The emergence of the three EDA companies was immediately followed by a long, continuing era of EDA acquisitions, as discussed in Part 5 of this article series.

The Mead-Conway design methodology’s reliance on the use of standard cells also triggered the emergence of design … Read More → "A Brief and Personal History of EDA, Part 6: The IP Era"