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Comment by brianobush | Hacker News Reader

(Cadence for those who don't know are basically the equivalent of SolidWorks for anything in EE. They are the only company (maybe Synopsis or Mentor, but I think there are a few holes here and there) on the planet that lets you go from designing something as simple and low level as an analog jellybean op-amp (with state of the art EM and S-param simulation) and verification, to RTL design (full power simulation and everything), to piecing together TSMC[edit: learn2proof-read, self]-based fab designs on their 28nm processes (ASICs or SoCs), to laying out boards at the Altium level. You're paying around 100k/yr/seat for all this but if you're actually using the whole feature set it's worth every cent.

Other than Solidworks (which has everything from industrial machining stock cold-rolled steel and the finite-element analysis of your components all the way to computational fluid dynamics of anything your engineering heart could desire) I've never seen a company cover such an industry so thoroughly, so well[1].)

[1] Maybeeee Adobe has equal coverage re: for vector work with Illustrator/image manipulation with PS/page layout and typesetting with PageMaker/Indesign and doing post on Video with After Effects and such. And I don't think anyone would disagree, the degree of complexity for this genre of software is on a different tier.

edit: Haha. Confused Cadence Design Systems with Cadence Research Systems. Thanks for correcting me. Mea culpa. Keeping this up just for continuity sake. Viva la Scheme though! Have an upvote, @beering ;)

TMSC?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC

Biggest "independent" semiconductor foundry company (independent = they make customer designs, not their own)

I guessed TSMC myself but wasn't sure it's not some EE acronym I'm unaware of.

Cool - was it used as a scripting language or for the core of the system?

I'm pretty sure that the Cadence you're thinking of is not the Cadence that owned Scheme. Cadence Research Systems was afaik a tiny entity that mainly owned Chez Scheme.

Yeah, it's a sifferent company. I doubt Cisco could even afford an EDA vendor other than little Mentor. Parent is also wrong about Cadence being only one that can do each of the major jobs: all of them have products for that. Too many to keep travk of actually.

Mentor has an advantage since they acquired Tanner, best of the budget ones.

Synopsys definitely has offerings for all of those things. IC Validator also completely blows both Cadence's and Mentor's offerings out of the water when it comes to DRC and LVS, although Calibre from Mentor Graphics has more market share in that area at the moment (though I think ICV might be slowly picking up steam when it comes to market share).

Amusingly Cadence Design Systems also uses Lisp from what I heard from people who worked there on a Lisp meetup.

AFAIK, Cisco never bought Cadence -- Cadence is an independent company -- maybe they bought some division or subsidiary of Cadence?

Wrong Cadence, CRS was a small company.

ah, thanks!

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