Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (stylized as cādence)[2] is an American multinational technology and computational software company.

[3] Initially specialized in electronic design automation (EDA) software for the semiconductor industry,[4] currently the company makes software and hardware for designing products such as integrated circuits, systems on chips (SoCs), printed circuit boards,[3] and pharmaceutical drugs, also licensing intellectual property for the electronics, aerospace, defense and automotive industries, among others.

[4][failed verification] Cadence Design Systems was officially formed through SDA and ECAD's 1988 merger,[4] with Joseph Costello was appointed both CEO and president of the newly combined company.

The revenues of the combined company were $390 million, making Cadence "the largest provider of the software used by electronic engineers to design computer chips and circuit boards," according to the New York Times.

[18] Between 2004 and 2007, Cadence purchased four companies, including the software developer Verisity, and in 2006, it spent $1 billion in stock buybacks.

[6] In 2007, Cadence announced it would be introducing a new chip-making process that laid wires diagonally as well as horizontally and vertically, arguing it would make its designs more efficient.

That year, Cadence was rumored to be in talks with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Blackstone Group regarding a possible sale of the company.

[22] Subsequent notable acquisitions included Cosmic Circuits[23] and Tensilica in 2013,[24] Forte Design Systems in 2014,[25] and the AWR Corporation in 2019.

[27] In April 2021, following a Washington Post report on the use of Cadence and Synopsys technology in the People's Liberation Army's military-civil fusion efforts,[28] 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.

[34] As of September 2023, Cadence was "looking into" applying for funding from the $52 billion CHIPS and Science Act, passed in 2022 bring more of the international semiconductor supply chain into the United States.

[39] It also has tools for "electromagnetics, thermal and computational fluid dynamics in the high-tech electronics, aerospace and defense and automotive sectors,"[5] and according to Investor's Business Daily in 2023, it specializes in products for fields such as "artificial intelligence and machine learning, cloud computing, 3D technology, and AI-enabled big data analytics.

"[42] Among market applications are "hyperscale computing, 5G communications, automotive, mobile, aerospace, consumer, industrial and health care.

[60] In 2015, Cadence announced the Palladium Z1 hardware emulation platform,[61] with over 100 million gates per hour compile speed, and greater than 1 MHz execution for billion-gate designs.

[70][71] Cadence supplies semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) blocks, covering interface design, USB, MIPI, ethernet,[72] memory, analog, SoC peripherals, and data plane processing units.

[citation needed] Cadence develops Tensilica DSP processors for audio, vision, wireless modems, and convolutional neural nets.

[91] Cadence in 2021 acquired a number of system analysis products from NUMECA,[92] known for software tools used in the automotive, marine, aerospace, and power generation industries.

[93] Among the tools were Fidelity (formerly known as OMNIS), a computational fluid dynamics (CFD), mesh generation, multi-physics simulation, and optimization product.

"[39] Cerebrus was released in 2021, and is a machine learning-based chip which utilizes reinforcement learning and is meant to automatically optimize the Cadence digital design flow.

[100] In September 2023, Cadence released software called ChipGPT, allowing companies to create custom silicon with assistance from AI.

[102] In 2019, Investor's Business Daily ranked Cadence Design Systems #5 on its 50 Best Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Companies list.

[106] Cadence partnered with the San Francisco 49ers in April 2023 on a several year technology project to fix energy efficiencies at Levi's Stadium.