Synopsys and Cadence veterans join local start-ups in Beijing tech push
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, Nikkei staff writers 5 HOURS AGO
Veteran engineers and high-level executives are leaving top US chip design toolmakers for Chinese rivals as Beijing seeks to break America’s near monopoly on this key segment of the semiconductor industry.
Three Chinese start-ups established since September last year were founded by or have hired executives and engineers from Synopsys and Cadence Design Systems of the US, the world’s two biggest makers of electronic design automation (EDA) tools, as such software is known.
The start-ups include Nanjing-based X-Epic, Shanghai Hejian Industrial Software and Hefei-based Advanced Manufacturing EDA Co, or Amedac, in which Synopsys owns a stake.
The push to recruit US chip tool talent comes as Washington’s crackdown on Huawei Technologies exposes key weaknesses in China’s chipmaking ecosystem, including in EDA tools, which are used to design integrated circuits, printed circuit boards and other electronic systems.
The US has long dominated the segment, with Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor Graphics and Ansys controlling 90 per cent of the global market for EDA tools. Mentor was taken over by Siemens in 2017 but maintains extensive research and development operations in the US. These four companies own much of the intellectual property needed for chip development and count the world’s top chip developers as clients, including Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Micron and Huawei.
China’s own EDA tools industry, by contrast, has been largely neglected until recently. Its two main homegrown companies, state-owned Empyrean Software, founded in 2009, and Beijing-based Cellixsoft, in 2002, are still unable to match the offerings of Synopsys and Cadence. Jinan-based Primarius Technologies, founded by a former senior Cadence executive in 2010, is likewise still struggling to catch up to its US rivals.
A wake-up call came last year when the US Department of Commerce banned Huawei, the world’s biggest telecoms equipment maker, from receiving software updates and technical support from American EDA tool makers without US approval.
This move sharply curtailed the capability of Huawei’s chip design arm, HiSilicon Technologies, as close co-operation with EDA tool providers is essential given the increasing complexity of chipmaking processes, and spurred China to act.
“We are seeing more and more people who previously worked with big US chip design tool companies joining start-ups because they think it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said a source from a China-based chip developer and Synopsys client. “Previously very few people would want to start up a chip design tool company because it’s a very niche market already dominated by huge players, but now they see growing customer demands for local software in China for the very first time.”
That new demand has led to the launch of at least three start-ups.
X-Epic, based in Nanjing, was founded in March by Wang Libin, a former vice general manager at Synopsys China, according to company data. TC Lin, former vice-president of Cadence with more than 30 years’ experience in EDA tools, joined the company as its chief scientist on August 3.
X-Epic announced in November that Tiyen Yen, another Cadence veteran, would join the company as vice-president of R&D.
Shanghai Hejian Industrial Software, founded in May, hired a high-ranking, China-based R&D executive from Synopsys in late October, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The executive worked for the US company for nearly two decades, they said.
Shanghai Hejian Industrial Software is backed by the state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of Shanghai Municipal Government and renowned Chinese venture capital firm Summitview Capital, according to online disclosures by the company.
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To be continued...
