The full name of EDA is Electronic design automation, that is, electronic design automation, which refers to the use of computer-aided design (CAD) software to complete the functional design, synthesis, verification, physical design (including layout, wiring, layout, design rule checking, etc.) and other processes of the ultra-large scale integrated circuit (VLSI) chip.
EDA tools are known as the "mother of chips", is the most upstream industry of chip manufacturing, is the key link between integrated circuit design, manufacturing and packaging and testing, and has an important impact on the production efficiency of the industry and the level of product technology.
Looking back at the history of the EDA tool, how has it evolved? How are the three giants overseas who dominate the EDA market trained today? In this issue, we will walk into the history of EDA.
01 How EDA tools move from "hand design" to "human-computer interaction"
In fact, before EDA, integrated circuits were designed by hand, and with the gradual expansion of the scale of integrated circuits and the increasing complexity of electronic systems, EDA developed into an automation tool and gradually matured commercially. Overall, the development of EDA tools has gone through about four stages.
Phase 1: Computer-Aided Design (CAD) Phase. In the 1970s, due to the low complexity of the chip, chip designers could manually complete the input, layout and routing of the circuit diagram. In the mid-1970s, the emergence of programmable logic design technology made it possible to automate chip design, and interactive graphic editing, transistor layout design, rule checking and other functions increased the automation of chip design. The more well-known manufacturers that appeared during this period were Applion, CALMA, ComputerVision and so on.
Phase II: Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) Phase. In the 1980s, EDA technology entered the stage of development and improvement, and the EDA tools introduced were based on logic simulation, timing analysis, failure analysis, automatic layout and wiring as the core, focusing on solving problems such as function detection, using these tools, designers can predict product functions and performance before product production. By the late 1980s, EDA tools were ready for design description, synthesis and optimization, and verification of design results.
Here, it is worth highlighting that the real breakthrough in EDA technology came in 1980. This year, Calver Mead, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, and Lynn Conway, a programmer at the Palo Alto Research Center, jointly published an epoch-making paper, Introduction to VLSI Systems, which became an important landmark event for the development of electronic design automation.
Why? Mainly because this paper proposes new ideas for chip design through programming languages, which inspired the birth of tools such as VHDL and Verilog. The use of programming languages for chip design further reduces the complexity of the work of chip designers and is an important driver in the commercialization of EDA. To this day, although the languages and tools used are still evolving, the way to design and verify the expected behavior of circuits through programming languages and synthesize low-abstract physical designs with tool software is still the basis of digital integrated circuit design.
At the same time, something quite important happened during this time – the commercial as-applied integrated circuit or ASIC industry was born. With the advent of assICs pioneered by companies such as VLSI Technology and LSI Logic, the need for automated chip simulation, design, and verification tools has become more common, and this development has spawned many new companies to meet this demand, and EDA has truly emerged.
Phase 3: Electronic Systems Design Automation (EDA) Phase. In the 1990s, with the standardization of the chip design process and the improvement of integrated circuit design methodologies, EDA chip design tools were full of flowers: programmable logic arrays, standard cell libraries, full/semi-custom design, as-applied integrated circuit design, etc.
It was also during this phase that Synopsys, Cadence and Mentor (now Siemens EDA) rose to prominence as leaders in the EDA space, a three-legged competitive landscape that continues to this day.
Phase IV: EDA enters a phase of rapid development. Around 2000, EDA software tools that support standard hardware languages at the two levels of simulation verification and design became more powerful, larger-scale programmable logic devices were continuously introduced, and system-level and behavioral-level hardware description languages tended to be more efficient and simple.
At present, EDA tools have been able to achieve full coverage of integrated circuit design, manufacturing, packaging and other aspects, and are used in design work in many fields, including analog circuits, digital circuits, FPGAs, PCBs, panels and other fields.
EDA is of great significance to the modern integrated circuit industry, it not only greatly reduces the design cost of chips, makes large-scale complex circuit design a reality, but also promotes the enrichment of IP ecology, and the combination of EDA technology and modern advanced technology is to bring new development opportunities for integrated circuit performance improvement and size reduction.
Nowadays, almost all chip design companies are inseparable from EDA software, without it, Qualcomm, Huawei, Apple and a series of chip manufacturers will not be able to develop new chips and complete the iterative upgrade of chips.
02 The three major international EDA giants have finally been cultivated
When introducing the development of EDA tools above, the three major international EDA giants (Synopsys, Cadence and Mentor (now Siemens EDA)) have already been mentioned.
The three EDA giants are all from the United States and were all founded in the 1980s and 1990s. Synopsys was founded by Aarde Geus, who worked at GE's Microelectronics Center; Cadence was a merger of SDA and ECAD; The predecessor of Siemens EDA is Mentor Graphics, Mentor Graphics was founded in 1981, the founding team came from the Oregon electronics manufacturing company Tektronix; in 2017, Mentor Graphics was acquired by Siemens, which renamed Mentor Graphics as Siemens EDA in 2021.
Since the 1990s, with the rise of the Formulass model, chip designers have become important users of EDA, and the main customers of EDA manufacturers in this period are chip design companies, including NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, etc. In addition, chip foundries such as TSMC have also become users of EDA products, and the EDA customer base has been further broadened.
During this period, Cadence pioneered the model of selling only software, the industrial attributes of EDA software were reflected, and then Synopsys and Mentor also established the order of the three worlds together with Cadence.
Throughout the history of these three EDA giants, they have launched numerous mergers and acquisitions since their inception to quickly complete leading product technologies. In fact, the history of EDA development is a history of mergers and acquisitions, with a staggering 200 mergers and acquisitions initiated by the Big Three alone, of which Synopsys has the highest number of mergers and acquisitions, up to 80; Cadence and Siemens EDA have 62 and 66 respectively.
Taking Synopsys as an example, since its establishment in 1986, Synopsys has initiated dozens of mergers and acquisitions transactions, constantly looking for products and their enterprises that have been proven successful in the market, and achieved the purpose of expanding business scale and technology integration through rolling mergers and acquisitions.
One of the most classics is that Synopsys acquired Avanti, a company that ended patent litigation with Cadence for $830 million in 2002, which made up the team and technology required for the whole process of digital integrated circuit EDA, and obtained nearly 40% of the market for chip back-end layout and wiring. It was this acquisition that changed the traditional "Synopsys front-end, Cadence-rear" landscape, allowing Synopsys to complete the layout of the cornerstone technology before entering the post-Moore's Law era.
In addition, Siemens EDA, whose predecessor was Founded in the United States, has acquired many semiconductor and EDA industry companies such as Synergy Dataworks and Silicon Compiler Systems in the nearly 30 years of development, and Mentor was eventually acquired by Siemens for $4.5 billion in 2010, becoming Siemens today EDA is also part of the Siemens Digital Factory DF Group.
There are two main reasons for the merger and acquisition of EDA giants, one is to complete their tool chain through mergers and acquisitions, and the other is to "nip" potential challengers in the bud.
It is precisely by relying on this kind of merger and acquisition that the big three have formed an insurmountable knowledge gap. The big three have the ability to provide a full set of chip design EDA solutions, but they have different competitiveness in specific segments and applications, and have different advantages in products.
After years of mergers and acquisitions, the influence of the big three markets has become increasingly concentrated. According to the ESD Alliance, from 1996 to 2020, the CR3 of the global EDA market has remained above 50%, and the pattern of Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor is relatively stable.
Of course, the "big cake" of the Chinese market is also the object of coveting by the three giants of EDA. Around the 1990s, the big three entered the Chinese market, but their arrival caused a fatal blow to China's local EDA industry at that time.
In fact, as early as the 1980s, China's EDA industry also had a short-lived glory, but unfortunately, like a flash in the pan, the glory soon fell silent, and for 15 years, what kind of "hidden feelings" does this history have? When did the turning point of the domestic EDA industry come? Regarding the history of this part, please also pay attention to the content of the next issue of [Core History]." (Proofreading/Holly)