Why is it so hard for startups to compete with Cadence?

If you talk to any chip designer, they’ll complain about Cadence’s chip design software. They’ll probably complain about Synopsys too, and maybe Mentor Graphics (which is now owned by Siemens, but everybody still calls them Mentor Graphics). These three companies have an oligopoly on chip design software, despite their software being slow, difficult to use, segfaulting constantly, and having user interfaces that look like they were designed in 2003. But if everybody hates these electronic design automation (EDA) tools so much, why hasn’t a cool new startup disrupted the industry? Well, startups have been trying for years. Way back in 2007, Xoomsys developed parallel Spice simulators to greatly speed up analog and mixed signal simulators, but failed to ever reach mainstream adoption. In 2011, Extreme DA was acquired by Synopsys for their multi-core static timing analysis tools. Rocketick Technologies met a similar fate in 2016, being acquired by Cadence for their multi-core RTL simulato

If you talk to any chip designer, they’ll complain about Cadence’s chip design software. They’ll probably complain about Synopsys too, and maybe Mentor Graphics (which is now owned by Siemens, but everybody still calls them Mentor Graphics). These three companies have an oligopoly on chip design software, despite their software being slow, difficult to use, segfaulting constantly, and having user interfaces that look like they were designed in 2003. But if everybody hates these electronic design automation (EDA) tools so much, why hasn’t a cool new startup disrupted the industry? Well, startup