Altair eying a place in EDA’s shifting landscape

The EDA industry is known for the trio—Cadence, Siemens EDA and Synopsys—that dominates it and how these companies turned into giants by acquiring smaller EDA outfits. Now, another EDA player is on the horizon, taking a similar path of serial acquisitions to attain design automation software glory.

Altair, a supplier of simulation and data analytics solutions, is cutting deals to expand its EDA footprint in several design automation areas. It has just announced that it will acquire Metrics Design Automation, a Canadian company built on a simulation-as-a-service (SaaS) business model for semiconductor simulation and design verification.

Figure 1 Merging simulation with workload and workflow optimization technology could bolster design verification tools. Source: Altair

The cloud-based business model has the potential to make high-caliber EDA tools much more affordable and accessible at a time when IC design verification has high licensing costs and may require hundreds and sometimes thousands of seats to run a single-chip simulation. Moreover, these EDA tools run on desktop machines and are not typically cloud-native or cloud-enabled.

Altair plans to combine its silicon debug tools with Metrics’ digital simulator, DSim, to offer simulation and debug capabilities as a desktop app, on company servers, or in the cloud. This will allow design engineers to pay only for what they use. DSim will be available through Altair One, Altair’s cloud gateway, where it will also be available for desktop download.

The combined solution will support Verilog and VHDL RTL for digital circuits in ASICs and FPGAs. Metrics is led by Joe Costello, an EDA industry veteran credited with turning Cadence Design Systems into a billion-dollar firm.

A plethora of EDA deals

Earlier this year, Altair named EDA Expert a channel partner for distributing its HyperWorks design and simulation platform within France. EDA Expert, founded in 2012 and headquartered in Arcueil, France, provides technical expertise and training to help manufacturers define suitable solutions for designing and manufacturing electronic systems and analyzing electronic boards.

Then, in June 2022, Altair announced acquisition of Concept Engineering, a supplier of automatic schematic generation tools, electronic circuit and wire harness visualization platforms that provide on-the-fly visual rendering, and electronic design debug solutions. Concept Engineering’s software would be integrated into Altair’s Electronic System Design suite and available via Altair Units.

Concept Engineering’s reactive visualization technology would help organizations accelerate their designs that have specific design architecture requirements as well as rigorous service needs. Next, its design debug solutions covered register transfer level (RTL), gate, and transistor design abstractions for both analog and digital disciplines.

Figure 2 Concept Engineering’s automatic schematic generation and visualization software components help developers create high-performance debugging cockpits, shorten software tool development cycles, lower software development and maintenance costs, and increase the product quality of EDA tools. Source: Altair

Finally, in September 2017, Altair announced that it would buy Runtime Design Automation, a Santa Clara, California-based company specializing in scalable solutions for high-performance computing (HPC). Runtime primarily served design engineers leveraging EDA tools to design CPUs, GPUs, and system-on-chips (SoCs).

Carving an EDA niche?

Altair calls itself a computational intelligence specialist, but its technology roadmap is increasingly converging and colliding with EDA tool offerings. It’s steadily accumulating EDA solutions in its technology arsenal to claim a stake in the EDA industry, which is now being transformed by artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing technologies.

Moreover, HPC, which Altair calls its forte, is taking center-stage in the semiconductor realm. So, the Troy, Michigan-based company might be aiming to carve out an EDA niche in this burgeoning market.

Still, Altair is nowhere near the EDA’s big three: Cadence, Siemens EDA and Synopsys. So, will Altair continue the acquisition spree and eventually challenge the dominance of the EDA trio? Or will it become an acquisition target over time due to its strengths in HPC, cloud, and AI? We at EDN will closely watch the developments in the acquisition sphere of the EDA industry.

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