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> The professional tools are licensed at 100k-200k/year per seat each, there is no way around them if you want to actually tape out the chip. Unless you talk a
by baybal2 6y ago
> The professional tools are licensed at 100k-200k/year per seat each, there is no way around them if you want to actually tape out the chip.
Unless you talk about countries where people simply don't pay for software no matter what.
Some companies are just fine with 10 years old pirated Virtuosos in places like China.
It was a big surprise to me that even software which probably has less than 100 licensees globally is still getting warezed.
- orbifold 6y agoYes, I can totally believe that, the software itself is actually distributed in a fairly convenient format, given that some of it is only compatible with some obscure RedHat version, so installation amounts to copying files from an iso image and pointing it to a license server. It probably is also easy to patch out the License server code. I would be fairly surprised if those places also had access to current gen PDKs and the required memory compilers. We have to basically order memory blocks by mail and don't get access to the tools to generate them ourselves.