Siemens acquires Mentor Graphics

Re:Siemens acquires Mentor Graphics by fnordfnordfnord on Thursday March 30, 2017 @09:30PM (#14000549)

I last used OrCad about ten years ago, and I hoped to never have to look at it again. It was a shit show, and even the terrible state of the open source tools available at the time was better. The whole EDA industry is a shit show, and it's no wonder they don't make any money; it's because they keep bodging on bit and bobs of incremental improvements, usually after someone else independently invents them. Why would anyone upgrade when the new stuff was the same as the old stuff? And look at what horrible problems document revision control are for CAD tools, they spawned a whole 'nother industry just to do the clerical work for the engineering staff.

>Synopsys and Cadence are the leaders of the pack.

Only by default and only through the inertia of lazy risk-averse management.

The CAD/EDA industry is a scourge.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Siemens acquires Mentor Graphics by deepnotderp on Thursday March 30, 2017 @10:39PM (#14000821)

Eh, I think you're being too hard. Although PCB tools might be different, as far as IC design goes, most of the problems at the earlier nodes were solved by the EDA companies throwing legions of (very expensive!) PhDs at the problem. I do agree that some things are annoying, such as documentation and UI, but a lot of this is because (scarce!) money is prioritized to solving problems and fixing bugs and they don't want to take a chance destroying the system. In particular, major customers tend to be extremely risk averse.

[ Parent | on HN ]