Cadence Design Systems

At Cadence, we've pledged ourselves to total customer satisfaction. In fact, commitment to customer success is one of our core company values. In support of this promise, Cadence president and CEO Ray Bingham created the Worldwide Customer Advocacy (WCA) organization. To ensure that every customer is satisfied with the Cadence experience, WCA was recently expanded to include Education Services and Customer Support. These changes allow WCA to focus on the primary mission of establishing a customer-centric corporate culture--one that fosters a universal commitment to customer needs, stronger customer relationships, and superior business value. ECAD acquires SDA and forms Cadence Design Systems; Costello is named CEO and president of the new firm. The company acquires Valid Logic Systems Inc. and becomes the leading EDA supplier. Cooper & Chyan Technology Inc. and High Level Design Systems are acquired; Costello leaves the firm to head up Knowledge Universe LLC. With revenues of $1.43 billion in 2001, Cadence Design Systems, Inc. is the world's leading developer of electronic design automation (EDA) products and services. EDA software is a form of computer-aided design and engineering (CAD/CAE) software specifically geared towards automating the design of electronic systems and integrated circuits (IC's). The company's products and services are used by companies in the computer, communication, and consumer electronics industries to design and develop IC's and electronic systems, including semiconductors, computer systems and peripherals, telecommunications and networking equipment, wireless products, automotive electronics, and various other electronic products. Cadence has operations in North America, Europe, Japan, and the Asia Pacific region. Cadence Design Systems Inc. was incorporated in June 1988 as the new company resulting from the merger of CAD software companies, ECAD Inc. and SDA Systems Inc. Computer-aided design of IC's was a rapidly growing field when Cadence started operations. As chip manufacturers tried to fit increasingly more tiny transistors on each chip, the complex layout of the chip's design and its verification came to depend on design automation software. ECAD, based in Santa Clara, California, developed and sold CAD/CAE software to accelerate the design of IC's, including both the schematic design and the testing phases. The company's specialty was design-verification software, in which it was a technology leader. The company's largest clients were Digital Equipment, NCR, Data General, National Semiconductor, and Advanced Micro Devices. ECAD was founded in August 1982 by Glen M. Antle, who held the posts of chairperson and chief executive officer until the SDA merger. Antle had worked on IC's and semiconductors since 1959 at Texas Instruments, ITT, Teledyne, and Data General. Until founding ECAD, Antle had headed the microelectronics products division of Systems Engineering Laboratories (SEL) in Sunnyvale, California. When SEL began developing a 32-bit computer, the company's CAD team devised an extremely fast algorithm for testing the new design. This new CAD testing technology would become the basis of ECAD's software products. In 1982, SEL was acquired by Gould Inc., and the Sunnyvale facility was shut down. Gould/SEL granted Antle the marketing rights to the CAD technology plus $25,000 in funding for the new software technology, in exchange for completing some unfinished work on an operating system on which Antle and his team were working. Thus, Antle incorporated his own company, ECAD Inc., and operations began in January 1983. ECAD began selling its first CAD integrated software package, Dracula, in April 1983. Dracula was a set of programs for integrated-circuit layout verification, which ran many times faster than the software of its competition. The package included a design-rule checker, an electrical rule checker, and a layout-versus-schematic consistency checker among other programs.