A Brief History of Cadence: the Post-Costello Years

Through the 1990s, Cadence made lots of smaller acquisitions. In 1997, Joe Costello stepped down as CEO and passed the reins to Jack Harding, who had joined Cadence earlier that year when Cadence had acquired Coopers and Chyan Technology, which had a shape-based router called IC Craftsman.

By the late 1990s, synthesis had become the dominant design methodology and Cadence had had internally developed a product in the space called Synergy. In 1998, Cadence acquired Ambit Design Systems with its BuildGates synthesis product. They would also later acquire Get2Chip in 2003.

In 1999, CEO Jack Harding moved on, and Ray Bingham, Cadence’s then CFO, became the new CEO.

Cadence had entered the emulation business in 1999 with the acquisition of Quickturn but, more significantly, in 2002 they acquired the emulation business of IBM. This technology has been the heart of Cadence’s emulation product line ever since, including the recently announced Palladium Z1.

There were three key acquisitions during the Ray Bingham era. Two were in 2001: Silicon Perspective, which had a tool for floorplanning and placement called First Encounter, and CadMos, which had signal-integrity tools and a technology that would be required for next-generation place and route. Then, in 2002, was Simplex, which had extraction and analysis capabilities.

In 2004, Ray Bingham left Cadence and Michael Fister, who had spent most of his career at Intel, became the CEO.

Verisity was a company that pioneered the constrained random approach to verification and created a language “e” for describing verification at a higher level than previously possible. Cadence acquired them in 2005.

In 2008, Mike Fister resigned as CEO and the after a brief interregnum with an interim CEO committee, Lip-Bu Tan was appointed CEO in 2009. He continues to be CEO today.

Cadence did not have a position in the fastest growing part of the EDA business, known as IP. This stands for Intellectual Property but has nothing to do with its more common meaning of patents and trademarks, but rather pre-defined and pre-characterized building blocks that can be incorporated easily into chips.

In 2010, Cadence acquired Denali, the leader in in modeling and IP for on-chip memories. It was also famous in the industry for hosting a party every Design Automation Conference, open to anyone, a tradition that Cadence has continued.

The other big IP acquisition was Tensilica, in 2013, which was the leader in reconfigurable processors used for offloading the main processor in specialized areas like audio and video processing with significant increases in performance, reductions in power, or both.

Cadence then went on an IP buying spree and rounded out their IP offering with acquistions of Cosmic Circuits, Evatronix’s IP division, and Transwitch's HIS business.

The most recent acquisitions have been at the system level with Forte Design Systems for their high-level synthesis (HLS) product and Jasper Design Automation for their JasperGold formal technologies, both acquired in 2014.

That brings us almost to the present.

To be continued...

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