Cadence created the new economic model for CAD companies. Its genesis can be traced to four insights developed by Richard Newton and Sangiovanni-Vincentelli:
- UNIX-based Workstations would dominate scientific and engineering computing.
- Software-only companies, instead of the hardware/software combination businesses dominating then, would be the computer-aided-design (CAD) leaders.
- Companies with a unified database and user interface would have a competitive advantage when they needed to integrate different tools from different sources. This eventually led to the OpenAccess database made available by Cadence as open-source software.
- The greatest competitive advantage would come from synthesis tools such as automatic routing and placement.
Synopsys, the second EDA company founded largely by Newton and Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, subsequently came from the desire to extend the synthesis approach to the optimized transformation of register-transfer-level languages to gates in electronic design.
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