Cadence Design Systems is a US engineering and software company.
The company is known for its electronic design automation (EDA) software, in addition to software, hardware and silicon structures for integrated circuits, printed circuit boards and systems on chips.
The company was founded in 1988 after the merger of two companies, SDA Systems and ECAD, merged together.
As of 2016, the company employed more than 7,000 people and had revenues of around $1.82bn. It has frequently appeared as one of the top places to work in Silicon Valley.
What exactly is EDA software?
Cadence’s products target various types of design and verification tasks, with the company saying:
“Designing chips and systems with such complexity – while meeting demands for performance, low power, and time to market – is possible only with advanced electronic design automation (EDA) tools.
“EDA software and hardware enables everything from the design of individual transistors to the development of software before any hardware is built. Another crucial enabling factor is semiconductor intellectual property (IP), which provides pre-verified building blocks for memory controllers and interface protocols, as well as specialized processors that are integrated into SoCs.”
Some of Cadence’s more well-known products include the Virtuoso Platform, which offers a set of tools for designing custom integrated circuits.
