Will the market dominance of EDA’s “big three” remain immune from the new factors that are impacting the semiconductor ecosystem? We tried to answer this question with the help of Laurie Balch (Pedestal Research), Harry Foster (Siemens EDA), David Kanter (MLCommons), KT Moore (Cadence), Wally Rhines (Cornami)
The global EDA market is notoriously dominated by just three U.S.-based major vendors: Cadence, Siemens EDA and Synopsys, of course. This status quo has been stable for decades; will it continue to be this stable in the future? Several new events and trends have recently started impacting the semiconductor ecosystem: US-China tensions, the AI boom, the growth of hyperscalers, massive subsidies supporting the construction of new fabs around the world etc. Will any of these new events have an impact on the EDA oligopoly? We tried to answer this question by interviewing EDA professionals (Harry Foster, Chief Scientist Verification at Siemens EDA; KT Moore, VP of corporate marketing at Cadence; Wally Rhines, CEO at Cornami and formerly CEO at Mentor Graphics for twenty-four years), an EDA market analyst (Laurie Balch, Research Director at Pedestal Research) and an executive from a benchmarking consortium (David Kanter, Executive Director at MLCommons, whose contribution will be featured in the next part of this report). In this first part, we will delve deeper into the factors of stability that have contributed to the creation of the oligopoly and still underpin the incumbents’ market dominance. Adding to the description of the status quo, we will also focus on the overall performance of EDA solutions, as well as on the attitude of the EDA industry towards benchmarking and open-source tools. The second part of our report will address some of the criticisms that have been raised against the EDA oligopoly and will consider some potential factors of change.
