Businessweek

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. develops, sells or leases, licenses, and maintains electronic design automation (EDA) software, hardware, verification intellectual property (VIP), and design intellectual property (Design IP) for semiconductor and electronics systems companies worldwide. The company provides maintenance for its product offerings and provides engineering services related to methodology, education, and hosted design solutions, which help its customers manage and accelerate their electronics product development processes. Products The company’s products are engineered to improve its customers' design productivity and design quality by providing a comprehensive set of EDA solutions and a differentiated portfolio of Design IP and VIP. The company combines its products and technologies into categories related to major design activities: Functional Verification, Hardware and IP; Custom IC Design; Digital IC Design; System Interconnect Design; and Design for Manufacturing, or DFM. The major Cadence design platforms are branded as Incisive functional verification, Virtuoso custom IC design, Encounter digital IC design and Allegro system interconnect design. The company’s functional verification offerings include VIP products and are supplemented by its Design IP offerings and its hardware offerings. In addition, the company augments these platform product offerings with a set of DFM products that service both the digital and custom IC design flows. The products and technologies included in these categories are combined with ready-to-use packages of technologies assembled from its portfolio of IP and other associated components that provide comprehensive solutions for low power, mixed signal and designs at smaller geometries referred to as advanced process nodes, as well as designs based on design IP owned and licensed by other companies, such as ARM Holdings plc. These solutions are marketed to users who specialize in areas, such as system design and verification, functional verification, logic design, digital implementation, custom IC design and printed circuit board, or PCB, and IC package and SiP design. Functional Verification, Hardware and IP Functional Verification products are used by customers to verify that the circuitry they have designed would perform as intended. Verification takes place before implementing or manufacturing the circuitry, significantly reducing the risk of discovering an error in the completed product. The company’s Functional Verification offerings comprise three major categories: Logic Verification, System Design and Verification, and Design IP. The company’s Logic Verification offering consists of planning, testbench automation, simulation, property checking and environment capabilities within the Incisive functional verification platform. This offering enables its customers to coordinate verification activities across multiple teams and various specialists for rapid verification planning and closure. The company’s System Design and Verification offerings consist of hardware-assisted verification that employs emulation and acceleration, including the Palladium XP, Palladium and Xtreme verification computing platforms, system-level design tools, accelerated VIP, estimation of SoC cost and performance and automation for hardware-software verification. In addition, this offering provides system power exploration, analysis and optimization. The QuickCycles offering allows customers access to simulation acceleration and emulation products, either on their secure Intranet site or remotely over a high-speed, secure network connection. The company’s Design IP offerings consist of pre-verified functional blocks, which customers integrate into their SoCs to accelerate the development process and to reduce the risk of errors in the design process. The company offers various types of Design IP, including controllers and physical interfaces, or PHYs, for standard protocols such as ethernet, peripheral component interconnect express, or PCI Express, dynamic RAM, and flash memory controllers. The company also offers a range of VIP and memory models, which model the expect