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Comment by dano | Hacker News Reader

Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor Graphics have been fighting it out in the EDA industry for decades. Synopsys and Cadence are the leaders of the pack. Synopsis has been the better stock over the last 7 years, however, Cadence has picked up well too.

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The industry is basically derelict which may be surprising to a lot of people. The design and layout software hasn't changed much in decades. Analog/RF mixed signal circuit design in particular is arcane, manual magic even though it doesn't have to be with modern computing power and simulation capabilities.

The main problem is that somehow there just isn't much money to be made in EDA tooling. Go to any EDA conference and ask anyone in a business booth.

There's quite a bit of money, a license for a small design shop will easily span from mid six figures to millions. There is rampant theft though, see the recent http://norcalrecord.com/stories/511081584-synopsis-claims-ub... as an example

The real reason innovation died is a complex and meandering sadness, but basically the business leaders prioritized head count and comfort over whatever it takes to lure creative, intelligent, academic, etc people into an industry and do non-linear things. I think there are similar parallels to computer architecture and operating systems, but these are a bit more widely approachable so there's still a small influx of academics and new companies.

> There is rampant theft though, see the recent http://norcalrecord.com/stories/511081584-synopsis-claims-ub.... as an example

This is not theft, but unauthorized use of the software.

What I heard from them is most of the money comes from a small percentage of customers doing expensive work. They don't want to take chances on unproven tools since mistakes cost too much. So, they keep using the Big 3. There's occasionally companies like Magma that show up delivering good value for a fraction of the price. Plus cheaper or better alternatives to Big 3 functionality such as Tanner. They usually get acquired, though, by companies that dislike effect of competition on profits. The integration of those features make the competition look even worse.

Those successful in EDA seem to mostly be niche players doing one job a lot better than Big 3.

Seems to be a general problem with design tools in many industries, isn't it?

When the jobs disappear it's hard to sell picks and shovels.

I think part of it is that the cost of messing up and having an undetected design fault in deployed hardware can be so huge for the big players. The big players are where the EDA vendors make most of their money and so derive their mindset. You make money by being reliable, and the easiest way to be reliable is to be conservative. Once the design process works, don't mess with it in case something breaks.

There were some startups in the 90's doing analog synthesis, but all flopped.

Tools for MMIC & RFIC design have become pretty advanced (specifically AWR).

I last used OrCad about ten years ago, and I hoped to never have to look at it again. It was a shit show, and even the terrible state of the open source tools available at the time was better. The whole EDA industry is a shit show, and it's no wonder they don't make any money; it's because they keep bodging on bit and bobs of incremental improvements, usually after someone else independently invents them. Why would anyone upgrade when the new stuff was the same as the old stuff? And look at what horrible problems document revision control are for CAD tools, they spawned a whole 'nother industry just to do the clerical work for the engineering staff.

>Synopsys and Cadence are the leaders of the pack.

Only by default and only through the inertia of lazy risk-averse management.

The CAD/EDA industry is a scourge.

Eh, I think you're being too hard. Although PCB tools might be different, as far as IC design goes, most of the problems at the earlier nodes were solved by the EDA companies throwing legions of (very expensive!) PhDs at the problem. I do agree that some things are annoying, such as documentation and UI, but a lot of this is because (scarce!) money is prioritized to solving problems and fixing bugs and they don't want to take a chance destroying the system. In particular, major customers tend to be extremely risk averse.

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