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Cadence Guilty, Pays $140M for Exporting Semi Design Tools to PRC Military Uni

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/cadence-design-systems-agrees-plead-guilty-and-pay-over-140-million-unlawfully-exporting
32•737min•3h ago

Comments

bobmcnamara•2h ago
Justice dept: used $140M fine

$100B Cadence: it wasn't very effective

Simulacra•2h ago
True, fines should be significantly higher for corporate malfeasance. Give them a $1 billion fine and they will start to consider but maybe they should change their behavior.
martin-t•1h ago
Maybe fines should have two components, one determined by the harm caused, the other by the offender's tolerance to the penalty.
DanielVZ•16m ago
Or should target the actual perpetrators and not the company. Some executive somewhere is seeing this as a win in the cost of doing business and has no disincentive to do criminal business in the future. But if they were fined themselves then they wouldn’t be so bold.
raverbashing•2h ago
"Exporting?" Why is China not using an "unofficial" version? (Honest question)
alephnerd•1h ago
EDA vendors know this is a risk, so EDA tools constantly need to "phone back home" to load updates and validate licenses. Plenty of functionality falls apart as well without that connectivity or support.

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.

15155•1h ago
> 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.

Zero of these programs have any level of copy protection remotely resembling Denuvo: no virtualization, debug symbols are commonly left intact.

alephnerd•1h ago
You don't need gaming style DRM like Denuvo to make it a pain. Logic Programming is hard, and bug fixes are constant - especially for anything 14nm and lower. A cracked EDA or PDK becomes useless fairly quickly if not constantly updated.

And the name of the game that's happening now is offering EDAs only via SaaS - the removing a major vector for piracy.

kayson•15m ago
> EDA tools constantly need to "phone back home" to load updates and validate licenses

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.

akersten•1h ago
So what's the secret sauce that cadence is not allowed to sell to personas non gratas? The article just says EDA tools but that's so broad. Is KiCAD export restricted?
triactual•1h ago
If you read the article, you will see that the technology is specifically semiconductor design tools required for developing high performance computing that the PRC would use for nuclear weapons development. Can you do that with KiCAD? No.
akersten•1h ago
> specifically semiconductor design tools required for developing high performance computing

I call that EDA for brevity

> Can you do that with KiCAD?

Yes, depending how you define "high performance computing" (my question here)

Cyph0n•1h ago
Isn’t KiCAD limited to PCB design, or is my understanding out of date?

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.

AlotOfReading•1h ago
People have hacked kicad into doing layout with the e.g. skywater 130 PDK. I wouldn't recommend it, but it's possible.

There's a whole lot more to an EDA tool than just layout or running spice though.

ipdashc•46m ago
KiCAD might not be a great example, but you could with something like https://github.com/The-OpenROAD-Project/OpenROAD (or roughly along those lines - I'm not a hardware person), no?

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?

mindslight•6m ago
"Open source" wouldn't be illegal, but the exporting would be. I've certainly seen libre software downloads that have click-throughs where you attest you're not in certain prohibited countries, IP blocks, etc. No idea if that would continue to be "enough" under this new fascist regime that doesn't care much for institutions like courts. Probably fine, up until it isn't.

(I'm not a member of any guilds)

vFunct•36m ago
For EDA gate-all-around technologies used in 2nm processes are banned from export by ITAR. This applies to device electrical modeling as well as physical design layout rules. You won’t find these GAA in KiCAD or OpenROAD.

I think for this case though it was specifically because Cadence sold a commercial product to a banned entity, instead of anything technology related.

kayson•14m ago
> According to Cadence’s admissions and court documents, employees of Cadence China did not disclose to and/or concealed from other Cadence personnel, including Cadence’s export compliance personnel, that exports to CSCC were in fact intended for delivery to NUDT and/or the PRC military. For example, in May 2015, a few months after NUDT was added to the Entity List, Cadence’s then-head of sales in China emailed colleagues, cautioning them to refer to their customer as CSCC in English and NUDT only in Chinese characters, writing that “the subject [was] too sensitive.”

Interesting. Sounds like Cadence China employees went rogue. Nonetheless, Cadence USA is on the hook.

mensetmanusman•4m ago
Nõice, can we build a splash pad somewhere with these winnings.

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