Quarterly result announcements – either from Q1 or Q2 – make up a significant part of this week’s news roundup. Manufacturing capacity expansion continues to be a hot topic, but there is no shortage of other updates. Quantum computing research is also in the news with two announcements.
Record EDA and IP revenues in Q1 2021
According to the latest report from the ESD Alliance, in Q1 2021 the Electronic System Design industry revenue increased 17% to $3,157.17 million, marking the strongest first-quarter growth ever. The four-quarter moving average, which compares the most recent four quarters to the prior four, rose 15%, the highest annual growth since 2011. All product categories significantly contributed, with double-digit growth in the CAE, IC physical design/verification, PCB/MCM, and semiconductor IP segments. Geographically, the Americas, EMEA and APAC regions also reported double-digit growth. Outstanding figures have been achieved by IC physical design and verification revenue, which surged 34.4% to $682.5 million compared to Q1 2020; and by the Asia Pacific revenue, which increased 26.9% to $1,166.3 million compared to Q1 2020. Quoted by Semiconductor Engineering, Wally Rhines – executive sponsor of SEMI‘s Electronic Design Market Data Report – underlined the Chinese figures: “Year on year, the revenue in China was up 73%. And if you look at EDA only, separate from IP, it was up 99%,” he reportedly said.
EDA updates: Ansys cloud support, Julia Computing funding
In collaboration with Arm, Ansys is enabling simulation solutions for AWS Graviton2 processors, a more affordable way to access Amazon Web Services cloud computing resources. The initiative marks the first availability of Ansys’ semiconductor simulation solutions on the Arm Neoverse architecture. Beginning with the APL (Ansys Power Library) characterization tool, Ansys will offer more of its semiconductor analysis software product suite, supporting the Arm Neoverse architecture that is used by AWS Graviton2-powered Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances.
