Mainstream EDA software bundles for ICs design

The world of electronic design automation (EDA) software for integrated circuit (IC) design is dominated by the three vendors Synopsys, Cadence Design Systems and Siemens EDA (Formerly Mentor Graphics, acquired in 2017 by Siemens) which have a revenue respectively of 4,2 billion US$, 3 billion US$ and 1,3 billion US$.

These vendors offer software bundles which allow to cover the full spectrum of IC design, from HDL synthesis to physical synthesis and verification.

The development of EDA software is tightly connected with the development of technology nodes. The properties of a specific semiconductor foundry, such as the transistor models, the physical characteristics and the design rules, are usually encoded in file formats which are proprietary to one or more EDA vendors. This set of files constitutes the process design kit (PDK) and it is usually developed as a joint effort between the foundry and an EDA vendor. Foundries therefore usually release PDKs which are compatible only for one specific EDA bundle. The information contained inside PDKs is usually considered confidential. PDKs are therefore usually protected by non disclosure agreements (NDAs) and may be shipped in an incomplete or in an encrypted form to the designers.

Proprietary software for electrical simulation (analog/mixed-signal/electromagnetic)

Of these, LTSpice and Micro-cap are free proprietary softwares based on SPICE. Micro-Cap was released as freeware in July 2019, when its parent company Spectrum Software closed down while LTSpice has been free for a long time.

Comparison of proprietary software for PCB design

Free & open source software EDA bundles for IC design

Free and open-source (FOSS) EDA software bundles are currently under fast development mainly thanks to the DARPA and Google's openROAD project. The OpenROAD project offers a complete stack of tools from high-level synthesis down to layout generation^[7] The flow includes Yosys for logic synthesis, OpenLane for physical synthesis and targets the SkyWater 130nm PDK. The flow is currently utilized to submit design for free fabrication at Google.^{[8][9][better source needed]}

Free & open source software for high-level synthesis

High-level synthesis software can generally be used for the design of both application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Most high-level synthesis software is used to edit and verify code written in one of the mainstream hardware description languages (HDL) like VHDL or Verilog. Other tools instead operate at a higher level of abstraction and allow to synthesize HDL code starting from languages like Chisel or SpinalHDL. The higher abstraction of such languages enables formal verification of HDL code.^{[10][11][better source needed]}

Free software for PCB design