Cadence in Brazil

How much do you know about Brazil? Probably, like me, not that much. And most of that has to do with football. Or Caipirinhas. One thing that I know that a lot of people apparently do not is that the local language is not Spanish but Portuguese. In fact, Brazil is so large that Portuguese is the most widely spoken language in South America.

You probably know of three cities there: Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Brasilia, the city built in the jungle when it was decided to move the capital from Rio. São Paulo is so big that more people speak Portuguese in just that one city than in the whole country of Portugal.

Belo Horizonte

I actually know of a fourth city, Belo Horizonte. It is about 450km due north of Rio. Before I rejoined Cadence, I was the blogger at Semiwiki assigned to write about Jasper Design Automation. I discovered that Belo Horizonte was the city where Jasper had an engineering organization. Of course, in 2014, Cadence acquired Jasper, and so ever since Cadence has had a Brazilian operation. It has grown a lot in the seven years since the acquisition.

Here's a map that shows all four of the cities I mentioned earlier. Belo Horizonte is the red pin. Rio and Sãa Paolo are on the coast, Brazilia is way inland in the top left of the map.

The history goes back a long way. The group in Belo Horizonte was started in 2004 with just four engineers providing services. In 2015, a Conformal R&D team was started in Brazil and, in 2018, HSV (hardware). Also, a technical field operations group was started. Today, in 2021, Cadence occupies three floors of the building with 200 employees and is still growing.

Today, the Brazil R&D team works on:

• JasperGold: Coverage and static checks
• Conformal: Low-power logical equivalence checking (LEC)
• Debug: Visualizer and tracer
• Hardware: Palladium, Protium
• VIP: Verification IP, interfaces, SerDes, Xcelium

There is also a field application engineering (FAE) team that provides local support (in Portuguese) for many products, ranging from photonics, to library characterization, to Tensilica IP, to analog mixed-signal, and PCB.

Here's a picture of everyone.

Cadence/SBMicro University Program

SBMicro was explained to me as being something like the NSF. It receives money from the government and then administers its distribution to academic institutions. They engaged with Cadence and now we have a Cadence/SBMicro University Program. So how did that come about?

Marcelo Silva, our director of application engineering, has the story:

In April this year, Jacobus Swart, Director of Sociedade Brasileira de Microeletrônica (SBMicro), a Brazilian Society focused on Microelectronics, reached out to Marcelo to have a discussion. Despite the focus of that meeting being on another subject, Jacobus proceed to mention that SBMicro was working on a program on Microelectronics for the Universities in Brazil and that included EDA tools. At that moment, SBMicro was closed with another vendor, but Marcelo requested an opportunity for Cadence participation and proceeded to speak about all the legacy that Cadence has with the Brazilian Microelectronic ecosystem including the CI Brazil program, a partnership between Cadence and the government that helped the development of startups, and a program that trained a large number of professionals in microelectronics. Through engagement with the Academic Network team and Cadence sales, Marcelo was able to show the strong value that Cadence would bring to the table with our Intelligent System Design strategy, including the best of System and Pervasive Intelligence along with chip design.

Thanks to this cross-functional collaboration, Cadence has become the official EDA provider for the SBMicro university program! Already, more than 35 universities, have access to Cadence solutions, with many more to come! This is a great partnership enabling Cadence and Brazilian universities to foster the next generation of innovators.

There are several important aspects to the program, perhaps the most important of all being that the tools and training Cadence is making available under the University Program are the same ones leveraged by commercial customers to develop industry-leading designs across verticals like 5G, automotive, agribusiness, and more. They are not some special "student" version. Any student who invests the effort to learn the tools at university will be able to hit the ground running in their first job. This covers the whole range of products: chip-package-board, analysis, analog, mixed-signal, RF, digital, verification, characterization, photonics, and more. We have a lot of stuff!

This is actually part of a much broader academic program that operates worldwide with over 1000 active member universities. This program has been running in one form or another for over 20 years. In addition to tool licenses, the program includes access to online training courses and the digital badges that go with certification (see my post Badges—Not Just for Scouts Anymore). There are also rapid adoption kits (RAKs) to get tools up and running fast, and generic PDKs so that they can be used in a realistic environment without all the complexities of getting "real" PDKs from foundries.

There is also a Cadence Academic Network LinkedIn Group.

Summary

The Cadence/SBMicro University Program includes:

• Licenses
• Cadence Online Support and Academic Online Support (COS and AOS)
• Generic PDKs
• RAKs
• Online training courses
• Cloud options

Learn More

To learn more about Cadence Academic Network (not just the Brazil part), it has its own page. There are also Cadence Academic Network LinkedIn Groups curated specifically for academia.

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