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And here I am designing physical consumer products thinking the people in EDA have it good. A single license of CAD software with an FEA analysis add-on can ea

And here I am designing physical consumer products thinking the people in EDA have it good. A single license of CAD software with an FEA analysis add-on can easily run you $15k. Then the thought of shelling out for physical product testing will make you cry yourself to sleep.

iron2disulfide 4y ago
The $1k figure quoted by OP is not indicative of the average price of licenses in my experience. There are plenty of tools that are $15k+ in the EDA world, and various engineers in chip design orgs are always battling about who gets to use them and when. There are whole teams in big SoC design shops dedicated to managing and procuring licenses. I was pretty far removed from the license procurement and budgeting aspect of my last chip design job, but IIRC we were in the multi-millions per year in various EDA tool licenses. That figure may or may not have included IP licenses for pre-designed off-the-shelf subsystems.
- artisanspam 4y ago
  I hadn’t even brought up IP licensing but you’re right. That’s another order of magnitude of cost and it’s incredibly important.
- nsteel 4y ago
  Same. We pay millions of dollars for our simulator licenses. Same again for physical design/layout licenses. These are for the standard ('best') industry tools, no IP. No idea what you get for $1k.
deleted 4y ago
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buildbot 4y ago
And Autodesk is a detestably evil company to boot.
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
Professional electronic design tools go through the stratosphere on pricing. There is lower demand than mechanical CAD tooling so they have to charge more to cover development costs. Lower demand also means that open source offerings usually pale in comparison to pro level tools from 20 years ago or more.
bsder 4y ago
Unfortunately the OP is off by two orders of magnitude. Most VLSI EDA tool licenses start at about $100K per seat per year and go up from there. If EDA tools were only $1K, we'd have lots of custom chips since a fab run in an old technology is actually $10K-$20K nowadays.
- artisanspam 4y ago
  It depends on what tool licenses you're talking about. A single license for Questa is in the thousands of dollars range. But lots of VIPs or backend tools will be a lot more.

iron2disulfide 4y ago

The $1k figure quoted by OP is not indicative of the average price of licenses in my experience. There are plenty of tools that are $15k+ in the EDA world, and various engineers in chip design orgs are always battling about who gets to use them and when. There are whole teams in big SoC design shops dedicated to managing and procuring licenses. I was pretty far removed from the license procurement and budgeting aspect of my last chip design job, but IIRC we were in the multi-millions per year in various EDA tool licenses. That figure may or may not have included IP licenses for pre-designed off-the-shelf subsystems.

artisanspam 4y ago
I hadn’t even brought up IP licensing but you’re right. That’s another order of magnitude of cost and it’s incredibly important.
nsteel 4y ago
Same. We pay millions of dollars for our simulator licenses. Same again for physical design/layout licenses. These are for the standard ('best') industry tools, no IP. No idea what you get for $1k.

deleted 4y ago

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buildbot 4y ago

And Autodesk is a detestably evil company to boot.

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago

Professional electronic design tools go through the stratosphere on pricing. There is lower demand than mechanical CAD tooling so they have to charge more to cover development costs. Lower demand also means that open source offerings usually pale in comparison to pro level tools from 20 years ago or more.

bsder 4y ago

Unfortunately the OP is off by two orders of magnitude. Most VLSI EDA tool licenses start at about $100K per seat per year and go up from there. If EDA tools were only $1K, we'd have lots of custom chips since a fab run in an old technology is actually $10K-$20K nowadays.

artisanspam 4y ago
It depends on what tool licenses you're talking about. A single license for Questa is in the thousands of dollars range. But lots of VIPs or backend tools will be a lot more.