Synopsys was founded by Aart de Geus, David Gregory and Bill Krieger in 1986 in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

[3][4] The company built a supercomputer using commodity Linux servers and off-the-shelf hardware in 2006 to develop and run EDA applications with intense computational requirements.

[10] In 2018, according to the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Synopsys partnered with the People's Liberation Army National Defence University to provide field-programmable gate array design training.

[18][19] In April 2021, following a Washington Post report on the use of Synopsys and Cadence Design Systems technology in the People's Liberation Army's military-civil fusion efforts,[20] U.S. legislators Michael McCaul and Tom Cotton requested that the United States Department of Commerce tighten controls on the sales of semiconductor manufacturing software.

[21][22] In 2022, Synopsys was reported to be under investigation by the United States Department of Commerce for unlawful technology transfers to sanctioned companies in China such as Huawei's HiSilicon and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation.

[23][24] In July 2022, agents from Taiwan's Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau raided the offices of a Synopsys-backed firm on suspicion of illegally poaching engineers from TSMC.[25][relevant?]

[28][29] In November 2023, Synopsys launched Synopsys.ai Copilot in collaboration with Microsoft, leveraging large language models from OpenAI to accelerate the process of semiconductor chip design.

[29][32] In September 2024, Synopsys announced it would sell its optical systems division to Keysight Technologies to address regulatory concerns related to its proposed acquisition of Ansys.

[35] CoWare development was initiated by the Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre in Belgium as an internal project in 1992;[36] it spun off as an independent company, supplying platform-driven electronic system-level (ESL) design software and services, four years later.

The company's self-titled flagship product is a vulnerability management system that combines and correlates the results generated by a wide variety of static and dynamic testing tools.

The company authored the Python-based PyCell software now central to IPL Alliance iPDK parameterized cells (used by many foundries such as TSMC), and also developed an automatic analog layout tools called Helix.

[52] Synplicity Inc. was a supplier of software for the design of programmable logic devices (FPGAs, PLDs, and CPLDs) used for communications, military/aerospace, consumer, semiconductor, computer and other electronic systems.

Synopsys took down the service for four weeks and confirmed the incident did not affect any of its corporate network and found no evidence of data abuse of its open-source users.

[63][64] In 2017 Synopsys acquired the atomic-scale modeling software company QuantumWise (former Atomistix), which provides tools for quantum-based and classical simulations in the field of material science.

[72] In January 2025, Synopsys announced that the European Commission had approved its proposed $35 Billion acquisition of Ansys in Phase 1, marking significant progress in obtaining regulatory clearances for the merger.

The company also reported that the UK Competition and Markets Authority had provisionally accepted remedies for Phase 1 approval, and the waiting period under the U.S. Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act had expired.

While actively working with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on proposed remedies review, Synopsys noted that China's State Administration for Market Regulation had officially accepted their merger filing.

The acquisition aimed to address growing customer demands for integrated Electronic Design Automation and Simulation and Analysis software solutions, with Synopsys maintaining its expectation to close the transaction in the first half of 2025.