> That's why China is non-export list for all of chip-design tooling

And that's, in part, why every IC shop I checked in China ran off decade old warezed Cadence EDAs.

Who could've knew that warez market exists even for such rare, pretty much custom made software for which there are less than <100 licensors in the world.

When you hear hoofbeats in Africa and are puzzled, think zebras, not horses: espionage, not warez

I did a six month contract for ASML years ago. Their Asian (and especially Chinese) sales people were notorious for giving away gigabytes and terabytes worth of “free” software or DVD images to any customer or potential customer who asked for them.

This caused major problems for the WAN between ASML headquarters in Eindhoven and the remote offices in those Asian countries.

True, and I know that a famous verilog simulator was sold to a chinese company as a _single_ license... lol ! But without support, especially as you go down the rabbit hole of prototyping/emulation, they won't compete. They know it and that's why China is building a complete set of verification and design tool of their own. It will take a while to catch up though...

Every company that uses Cadence, etc. has somebody on staff who can "handle" the license server "issues", whether in the US or overseas.

The difference is that in the US enough licenses are used to pay for the "average" number of users, while overseas it's zero.

And frankly, if the big EDA tools companies actually fixed and improved their software instead of milking it for decades, legit US clients would care more than they do now.

For those who haven't had the pleasure, most EDA products are like buying a boxed Windows in 2021 and they turn out to actually be Win 3.1 - no exaggeration.