A Brief and Personal History of EDA, Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor Graphics - The EDA Era

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Rising complexity drove the creation of ever-more-powerful tools for electronic design. When circuit board and IC layouts escaped the bounds of pencil, paper, and manual dexterity, CAD tools from Applicon, Calma, and Computervision appeared.

www.eejournal.com/, Apr. 15, 2024 – 

When polygon representations no longer sufficed as the first gate arrays appeared, CAE tools from Daisy, Mentor, and Valid appeared. These CAE companies attempted to provide all-in-one design suites for ICs and circuit boards. However, Moore's Law drove IC complexity far beyond the abilities of these CAE design tool suites. More complex ICs demanded even more refined tools for logic simulation, timing analysis, and design rule checking, driving the CAE Era to evolve into the EDA Era. As with the CAD and CAE Eras, three companies again came to dominate the EDA Era: Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor Graphics.

Cadence Design Systems

Jim Solomon earned his MSEE degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1960, during the war in Vietnam. He quickly latched onto a job with the Motorola Systems Research Lab in Riverside, California because, as Solomon explains in his oral history, "It had to be a defense job, otherwise I'd get drafted." After three years of working on radar and missile control systems, he realized that he didn't want to work on military projects any longer. Solomon transferred to Motorola's Semiconductor Products Division in Phoenix and spent the next seven years there designing analog ICs including op amps, voltage regulators, analog multipliers, TV circuits, and stereo decoders.

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