Recently, I’ve been thinking about how vital partners are to the EDA industry in general, and for Agnisys in particular. When I thought about writing a blog post on this topic, I asked myself whether this might be of interest to anyone beyond other EDA companies. After some consideration, I realized that who we partner with, and how, and why, is quite important for our users. In fact, when I talk with both prospective and current customers, this is a topic that comes up quite often. So, I decided to give some background on the way that EDA partnerships work and cite a few noteworthy examples.

Let me start with why the idea of partnerships exists at all. The reason is simple: users demand that their EDA vendors work together. The reality is that every chip development team uses tools from multiple vendors. No single vendor, not even any of the “Big 3” industry leaders, offers every possible tool and form of IP required for a comprehensive chip design and verification flow. Users need to be able to choose best-in-class tools from different vendors and deploy them together on a single project. However, users do not want to have to integrate and test the tools together all by themselves.
(more…)