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Yes and yes. EDA companies are gatekeeping monopolies. They absolutely abuse their monopoly position to extract huge chunks of money out of companies, and are
by bsder 2y ago
Yes and yes.
EDA companies are gatekeeping monopolies. They absolutely abuse their monopoly position to extract huge chunks of money out of companies, and are pretty much single-handedly responsible for the fact that the hardware startup ecosystem is moribund compared to that of the software startup ecosystem.
They have been horrible liars about performance and benchmarketing for decades. They dragged their feet miserably over releasing Linux versions of their software because they were extracting money based upon number of CPU licenses (everything was on Sparc which was vastly inferior). Their software hasn't really improved all that much over decades--mostly they benefited from Moore's Law. They have made a point of stifling attempts at interoperability and open data exchange. They have bought lots of competitors mostly to just shut them down. I can go on and on.
The EDA companies aren't quite Oracle--but they're not far off.
This is one of the reasons why Google is getting pounded over this--maybe even unfairly. People in the field are super sensitive about bullshit claims from EDA vendors--we've heard them all and been on the receiving end of the stick far too many times.
- alexey-salmin 2y ago> pretty much single-handedly responsible for the fact that the hardware startup ecosystem is moribund compared to that of the software startup ecosystem. This was the case before EDA companies even appeared. Hardware is hard because it's manufacturing. You can't "iterate quickly", every iteration costs millions of dollars and so does every mistake.
- bsder 2y ago> Hardware is hard because it's manufacturing. You can't "iterate quickly", every iteration costs millions of dollars and so does every mistake. This is true for injection molding and yet we do that all the time in small businesses. A mask set for an older technology can be in the range of $50K-$100K. That's right about the same price as injection molds. The main difference is that Solidworks is about $25K while Cadence, et al, is about a megabuck.
- octoberfranklin 2y agoand are pretty much single-handedly responsible for the fact that the hardware startup ecosystem is moribund Yes but not single-handedly -- it's them and the foundries, hand-in-hand. No startup can compete with Synopsys because TSMC doesn't give out the true design rules to anybody smaller than Apple for finfet processes. Essentially their DRC+LVS software has become a DRM-encoded version of the design rule manual.
- teleforce 2y ago> The EDA companies aren't quite Oracle--but they're not far off. Agreed with most you mentioned but not about EDA companies are not worst than Oracle, at least Oracle is still supporting popular and useful open source projects namely MySQL, Virtualbox, etc. What open-source design software these EDA companies are supporting currently although most of their software originated from open source EDA software from UC Berkeley, etc?