Furthermore, the resources that you would need to spend constantly cracking newer versions just isn't worth it when similar capital could be spent building home grown alternatives.
Finally, cracking and building a clone does cause liability risks for Chinese companies attempting to expand abroad. Companies are companies first - even in China - and the appetite for Huawei getting completely blocked from all of the EU, Singapore, SK, JP, India, etc where both the large EDA vendors and Chinese vendors coexist makes it a proposition that isn't worth it.
Zero of these programs have any level of copy protection remotely resembling Denuvo: no virtualization, debug symbols are commonly left intact.
And the name of the game that's happening now is offering EDAs only via SaaS - the removing a major vector for piracy.
This isn't true in my experience. Cadence, Synopsys, and Siemens tools all use local license files or license servers (mainly FlexLM). Updates are just downloaded from their website.
I call that EDA for brevity
> Can you do that with KiCAD?
Yes, depending how you define "high performance computing" (my question here)
Cadence tooling is for end-to-end electronics design - from transistor/standard cell up to PCB.
So technically they’re both EDA tools, but one is in another league as far as sophistication goes.
There's a whole lot more to an EDA tool than just layout or running spice though.
The parent's question still seems applicable. Is this basically down to a judge to decide the line at which a certain technology is too advanced to export? Would open sourcing an EDA tool be illegal if it was sufficiently capable?
(I'm not a member of any guilds. And I guess the downvote is for the political incorrectness. Plus ça change)
I think for this case though it was specifically because Cadence sold a commercial product to a banned entity, instead of anything technology related.
Is this actually because of legal requirements, or because of reality?
Nobody with access to a bleeding-edge node is using vastly inferior FOSS tools that can't actually work with a brand new fab PDK (which was produced specifically for Synopsys or Cadence tools.)
"These exports or reexports included the following transactions between 2015 and 2020:
a) Ten (10) sales and exports of EDA hardware, including items classified under ECCN 3B991b.2.c;
b) Seventeen (17) sales and exports or reexports of EDA software, including items classified under ECCN 3D991 or designated EAR99;
c) Seven (7) sales and exports or reexports of semiconductor design technology, specifically IP, including items classified under ECCN 3E991; and
d) Twenty-Two (22) loans and exports of EDA hardware, including items classified under ECCN 3B991b.2.c and items designated EAR99 "
Interesting. Sounds like Cadence China employees went rogue. Nonetheless, Cadence USA is on the hook.
bobmcnamara•6mo ago
$100B Cadence: it wasn't very effective
Simulacra•6mo ago
martin-t•6mo ago
DanielVZ•6mo ago
bobmcnamara•6mo ago
DanielVZ•6mo ago
shash•6mo ago
The fine doesn’t need to be a significant portion of their earnings, just like a parking ticket needn’t be a significant portion of your wealth. It just needs to be high enough that the action that caused it makes them less than the act of not doing that.
bobmcnamara•6mo ago
gruez•6mo ago
Teever•6mo ago
Not only should they be proportional but they should have an exponentially increasing rate for reoffense of the same or similar crime with a cooling off period for the escalation of a year or two.
Fines should never be a 'cost of doing business's for anyone. They should sting and dissuade offenders from reoffending.
gruez•6mo ago
Teever•6mo ago
The first one should be a slap in the face wake up call for the entity receiving it and the sequential should quickly grow to create an uneconomical situation for the offender such that they are forced to change their practices or go bankrupt.
This goes for all fines given out to private individuals, businesses, big and small, rich and poor.
recursivegirth•6mo ago
gruez•6mo ago
That's already the case. According to the plea agreement they paid $140M in fines for $45M worth of sales.
Teever•6mo ago
DoctorOW•6mo ago
gopher_space•6mo ago
bobmcnamara•6mo ago