Cadence Design Systems

Cadence was involved in a 6-year-long legal dispute[19] with Avanti Corporation, in which Cadence claimed Avanti stole Cadence code, and Avanti denied it. According to Business Week "The Avanti case is probably the most dramatic tale of white-collar crime in the history of Silicon Valley".[19] The Avanti executives eventually pleaded no contest and Cadence received several hundred million dollars in restitution. Avanti was then purchased by Synopsys, which paid $265 million more to settle the remaining claims.[20] The case resulted in a number of legal precedents.[21]

Quickturn Design Systems, a company acquired by Cadence, was involved in a series of legal events with Aptix Corporation. Aptix licensed a patent to Mentor Graphics and the two companies jointly sued Quickturn over an alleged patent infringement. Amr Mohsen, CEO of Aptix, forged and tampered with legal evidence and was subsequently charged with conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice. Mohsen was arrested after violating his bail agreement by attempting to flee the country. While in jail, Mohsen plotted to intimidate witnesses and kill the federal judge presiding over his case.[22] Mohsen was further charged with attempting to delay a federal trial by feigning incompetency.[23][24] Due to the overwhelming misconduct, the judge ruled the lawsuit as unenforceable and Mohsen was sentenced to 17 years in prison.[25] Mentor Graphics subsequently sued Aptix to recoup legal costs. Cadence also sued Mentor Graphics and Aptix to recover legal costs.[26]

• 1989: acquired Gateway Design Automation, the inventor of Verilog HDL.
• August 1993: acquired Comdisco Systems Inc, a provider of network design and optimization software.
• May 1997: acquired Cooper & Chyan Technology (CCT), a provider of PCB and IC automatic place and router software solutions (Specctra).[27]
• December 1998: acquired Quickturn Design Systems, Inc., a market leader in microchip emulation.[28]
• June 1999: acquired OrCAD Systems, a market leader in shrink-wrap PCB Design Tools.[29]
• October 2002: acquired IBM's Test Design Automation group.
• January 2003: acquired Celestry Design Inc, a provider of fast-spice and reliability simulators.
• September 2003: acquired Verplex Systems, a provider of Formal Verification products, Conformal Solutions and Blacktie Property Checker.[30]
• April 6, 2004: acquired Neolinear Technology, a privately held company specializing in rapid analog design technology.[31]
• April 7, 2005: acquired Verisity, Ltd., a provider of verification process automation solutions ($315 million in cash).
• In 2007, the company began talks with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Blackstone Group regarding a possible sale of the company.[32]
• July 12, 2007: acquired Invarium, a photolithography specialist.
• August 15, 2007: acquired Clearshape, a developer of Design for Manufacturability (DFM) technology.[33]
• March 11, 2008: acquired ChipEstimate.com, an IP Portal and developer of IC planning and IP reuse management tools.[34]
• August 15, 2008: Cadence withdrew a $1.6 billion offer to purchase rival Mentor Graphics.[35]
• June 17, 2010: completed acquisition of Denali Software.[36]
• May 10, 2011: acquired Altos Design Automation, Inc., vendor of standard and complex cell libraries for the delivery of complex SoCs at advanced nodes.[37]
• July 12, 2011: acquired Azuro, creator of clock concurrent optimization technology.[38]
• July 2, 2012: acquired Sigrity, a leader in high-speed PCB and IC packaging analysis[39]
• February, 2013: acquired Cosmic Circuits, a provider of analog and mixed signal intellectual property (IP) cores. Cosmic Circuits offers IP products in connectivity and mixed-signal technologies in the 40 nm and 28 nm process nodes, with 20 nm and FinFET in development.[40] The acquisition was completed in May 2013.
• March, 2013: acquired Tensilica, known for Dataplane Processing Units (DPU). Tensilica provides configurable and extensible processors along with DPUs for audio, baseband, imaging etc. It has 200 licensees and has shipped 2 billion cores so far.[41]
• June, 2013: completed acquisition of the IP business of Evatronix, SA SKA of Poland. This acquisition brings to Cadence IP including certified USB 2.0/3.0, MIPI, display, and storage controllers.[42]
• February 14, 2014: acquired Forte Design Systems, a provider of high-level synthesis (HLS) software products. This includes Cynthesizer, a SystemC-based behavioral synthesis tool that enables design creation at a higher level of abstraction.
• June 16, 2014: completed acquisition of Jasper Design Automation, Inc., a market and technology leader in the fast-growing formal analysis sector.[43]
• April 28, 2016: completed acquisition of Rocketick Technologies, Ltd., an Israel-based pioneer and leading provider of multi-core parallel simulation.[44]
• November 1, 2017: completed acquisition of nusemi inc, a Mountain View based provider of serial communication IP.[45] The acquisition resulted in Cadence's leading position in the high speed serial communication market.[46],.[47]
• January 15, 2020: completed acquisition of AWR Corporation from National Instruments
• February 14, 2020: Cadence acquired Integrand Software[48]   

The company has also acquired Valid Logic Systems, High Level Design (HLD), UniCAD, CadMOS, Ambit Design Systems, Simplex, Silicon Perspective, Plato and Get2Chip.

Denali Software, Inc. was an American software company, based in Sunnyvale, California, now acquired by Cadence.[49] The company produces electronic design automation (EDA) software, intellectual property (IP) and design cores and platforms for memory, other standard interfaces and system-on-chip (SoC) design and verification. It has its engineering offices in Sunnyvale, Austin and Bangalore. Incorporated in 1996, Denali is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and serves the global electronics industry with direct sales and support offices in North America, Europe, Japan and Asia.

On May 2010, Cadence Design Systems announced that it would acquire Denali for $315 million.[50]

Valid Logic Systems was one of the first commercial electronic design automation (EDA) companies, now acquired by Cadence. It was founded in the early 1980s,[51] along with Daisy Systems Corporation and Mentor Graphics, collectively known as DMV. The engineering founders were L. Curtis Widdoes,[52] Tom McWilliams[53] and Jeff Rubin,[54] all of whom had worked on the S-1 supercomputer project at Livermore Labs.

Valid acquired several companies such as Telesis (PCB layout),[55] Analog Design Tools,[56] and Calma (IC layout). In turn, Valid was acquired by Cadence Design Systems in the early 90s.[57]

Valid built both hardware and software, for schematic capture, logic simulation, static timing analysis, and packaging. Much of the initial software base derived from SCALD ("Structured Computer-Aided Logic Design"), a set of tools developed to support the design of the S-1 supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.[58] Later, Valid expanded into IC design tools and into printed circuit board layout.

At first, Valid ran schematic capture on a proprietary UNIX workstation, the SCALDSystem, with static timing analysis, simulation, and packaging running on a VAX or IBM-compatible mainframe. However, by the mid-1980s, general purpose workstations were powerful enough, and significantly cheaper. Companies such as Mentor Graphics and Cadence Design Systems sold software only for such workstations. By 1990, almost all Valid software was also running on workstations, primarily those from Sun Microsystems.