What Does Cadence Do?

Cadence is a pivotal leader in electronic systems design, building upon more than 30 years of computational software expertise. The company applies its underlying Intelligent System Design strategy to deliver software, hardware, and IP that turn design concepts into reality. Cadence customers are the world’s most innovative companies, delivering extraordinary electronic products from chips to boards to complete systems for the most dynamic market applications including hyperscale computing, 5G communications, automotive, mobile, aerospace, consumer, industrial, and healthcare.

Almost everything depends on electronics in one form or another. Homes are full of electronics: the TVs, Wi-Fi router, cable modem, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and electronic doorbells. All of the appliances now rely heavily on electronics. In recent years, the shortage of electronic parts for vehicles has become a worldwide problem because vehicles can’t function without these parts.

Most of these electronics are connected to a datacenter in the cloud. Your devices are automatically updated. You download messages, pictures, videos, and more.

All of these electronics have to be designed by someone – and those people are usually Cadence customers. They use Cadence software, also known as electronic design automation (EDA) software, on their computers. The software is quite complicated, with specialized programs for different parts of the design. One of Cadence’s big jobs is to make sure all the software programs work well together, and all necessary data can easily be shared between the different design programs. This is a huge challenge, as massive amounts of data are involved in designing devices that are so complex.

Cadence delivers software to help engineers design integrated circuits - or chips - those black squares with “feet” mounted on the printed circuit boards inside your electronics. And yes, Cadence also delivers software to properly connect all the chips on the printed circuit boards. Tiny elements called transistors form the “guts” of the chips, and most complex chips have literally billions of these transistors, which form electronic circuits.

The rapid electronics evolution is amazing. From the birth of the integrated circuit in the 1950s, the number of transistors on a single chip has been doubled every year or two, an effect predicted by engineer Gordon Moore and thus called “Moore’s Law”. By doubling every two years, engineers are able to design new features and enhance existing features at an amazing rate. The graphics in your smartphone are far superior to those found in flight simulators costing tens of millions of dollars forty years ago.

Cadence started in the early 1980s in the era of tens of thousands of transistors per chip, where automating that design process became essential. Cadence developed software that could turn a designer’s ideas into the instructions required by the factories that manufactured the chips.

As chips evolved from thousands to billions of transistors, Cadence started offering common functions that different design groups can use as proven building blocks in their chips, speeding the design process. Cadence continues to expand this library of pre-built functions, called intellectual property (IP), both by designing this IP and by purchasing companies that made excellent IP that worked well with Cadence’s design software tools.

Cadence uses expertise in developing computational software to create products that enable electronics design and improve productivity. Computational software is a combination of computer science and mathematics. This has allowed Cadence to expand into more than just the design of chips. Now Cadence is intimately involved in the design of whole electrical and electromechanical systems, the design of boats and jet engines known as fluid dynamics, and most recently, the molecular design of drugs.

As chips became bigger, Cadence discovered that there are artificial intelligence (AI) techniques that can further enhance the efficiency of individual designers trying to manage the complexity of billion-transistor chips. As a pioneer in applying advanced AI techniques for electronics designers, Cadence has developed ways to enable designers to focus on their own areas of expertise and leave the more routine parts of the design to the tools themselves.

Over the years, expect that Cadence will continue to evolve to meet the needs of its customers, so they can keep designing highly innovative products to add value to your life.