War in Europe is obviously our top news update this week, even though war coverage is the job of TVs and daily newspapers. For our part, going forward we will try to monitor the impact that this tragic event is going to have on the semiconductor ecosystem and on the IT industry – in terms of supply chain disruptions, sanctions consequences and so on. For the moment, let’s move to our usual weekly news update.
Cadence’s 2021 results
Cadence achieved a revenue growth of 11% in 2021, reporting a $2.988 billion income compared to $2.683 billion for 2020. On a GAAP basis, in 2021 the company obtained an operating margin of 26 percent. The outlook for 2022 projects a revenue growth of approximately 12%. In a prepared statement issued on occasion of the latest financial results conference call, Cadence’s CEO Anirudh Devgan provided some details about the results achieved by the company in 2021. Cadence’s digital full flow was adopted by more than forty-five additional customers during the year, and preexisting relationships with Oppo and Socionext were expanded. As for the machine learning-based Cerebrus solution, Devgan only mentioned the benefits obtained by some unidentified users: a “market shaping U.S automotive company” reduced the power consumption of a critical five nanometer SoC AI block by nearly ten percent in just two weeks; a “premier Asia Pacific systems company” reduced power of their four-nanometer design by ten percent with one-tenth the effort of manual optimization; a “marquee US semiconductor company” taped out their next generation SoC with a 5x productivity improvement on several critical blocks. In 2021, Cadence’s Verification business grew twenty percent year-over-year, fueled by what Devgan called “a record year for hardware.” Demand for Palladium Z2 and Protium X2 platforms “has greatly exceeded our expectations,” he said. More than half of customers purchased both platforms during the year, and the “hardware family” added over thirty new customers. Devgan also pointed out that 2021 was “an exceptional year” for Jasper formal verification platform, which added over forty new customers. Other details offered by Devgan include SK Hynix and Micron being among the adopters of Spectre FX FastSPICE; the addition of “nearly a hundred new logos (…) notably in Aerospace & Defense” following Cadence’s acquisitions of Numeca and Pointwise; and the growth of cloud-based solutions, now used by over 250 customers.
Cadence also announced a strategic partnership with French company Dassault Systèmes, through which the Allegro platform has been have combined with Dassaults’ 3DExperience platform to create a ‘virtual twin’ experience that integrates capabilities for electronic and mechanical products.
Anirudh Devgan. Credit: Cadence
