You are currently viewing SemiWiki as a guest which gives you limited access to the site. To view blog comments and experience other SemiWiki features you must be a registered member. Registration is fast, simple, and absolutely free so please, join our community today!
As someone who went through the injunction phase of the CDN vs Avant! legal battle I can tell you that this is a serious problem for ATopTech sales people. You may have noticed that the ATopTech TSMC relationship has also chilled(no mention of 7nm support and no partner awards).If there is someone out there using ATopTech for FinFETs please let me know why you chose ATopTech and how it is going. Post it here or private email is fine...
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Dec. 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq:SNPS) today announced that a California Federal District Court has issued a permanent injunction against ATopTech and in favor of Synopsys. The injunction prohibits ATopTech from developing, using, selling, offering to sell, licensing or distributing any product containing PrimeTime report formats or certain PrimeTime non-SDC commands, variables or attributes. The injunction also prohibits ATopTech's support of such products after March 2017.
Synopsys filed its lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in 2013, alleging that ATopTech copied elements of PrimeTime's command set into its Aprisa product, thereby violating Synopsys copyrights. The court ruled that the command set elements were protected by copyright, which had been disputed by ATopTech. In March of 2016, a jury found that ATopTech infringed Synopsys' copyrights and awarded Synopsys $30.4 million in damages.
About Synopsys Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq: SNPS) is the Silicon to Software™ partner for innovative companies developing the electronic products and software applications we rely on every day. As the world's 15th largest software company, Synopsys has a long history of being a global leader in electronic design automation (EDA) and semiconductor IP and is also growing its leadership in software security and quality solutions. Whether you're a system-on-chip (SoC) designer creating advanced semiconductors, or a software developer writing applications that require the highest security and quality, Synopsys has the solutions needed to deliver innovative, high-quality, secure products. Learn more at www.synopsys.com.
Interesting - the subject of the lawsuit has always been a challenging area for anyone hoping to develop implementation-related technologies. To tag onto or displace Synopsys flows, you have to have Tcl compatibility in constraints. But doing that in full is a violation of the SNPS copyright - you are only allowed to use the SDC subset in a compliant tool, which is more or less useless for anyone trying to port a design to your tool. Various smaller companies have probed the boundaries of SNPS vigilance in this area; I guess they too are now on notice (after all, you can't maintain a copyright unless you assiduously pursue all violators, right?).
Interesting - the subject of the lawsuit has always been a challenging area for anyone hoping to develop implementation-related technologies. To tag onto or displace Synopsys flows, you have to have Tcl compatibility in constraints. But doing that in full is a violation of the SNPS copyright - you are only allowed to use the SDC subset in a compliant tool, which is more or less useless for anyone trying to port a design to your tool. Various smaller companies have probed the boundaries of SNPS vigilance in this area; I guess they too are now on notice (after all, you can't maintain a copyright unless you assiduously pursue all violators, right?).
Here's the thing, FinFET design gets harder and as we go to down 10nm, 7nm, and 5nm so there will need to be a much tighter integration between tools. The other issue is with customers as they are much less supportive of multiple vendor flows and point tools. The top tier customers now want one "throat to choke" in order to get their designs done on time and on spec. You can also see this with the EDA vendors and fabs as they no longer promote mutli vendor flows (reference design flows etc...).
So what is an emerging EDA vendor to do? Simple, hire a person like myself to help triangulate customer, vendor, and fab support, absolutely.
ATopTech Responds to Recent Court Ruling in Copyright Case
SANTA CLARA, California, December 29, 2016 – ATopTech, Inc. announced today that a December 21, 2016 court ruling applies narrowly to older versions of its Aprisa software and does not affect newer or future versions of the popular place-and-route engine. In the ruling, the Federal Court in San Francisco, Calif. enjoined ATopTech from using a certain set of input command terms and report formats that existed in versions of its Aprisa software. These formats were the subject of a copyright trial in March, 2016. The specific set of command terms and formats that were at issue in the copyright trial no longer exist in versions of Aprisa released after version 15.10 (first released in Oct. 2015).
The injunction also does not apply to ATopTech customers, but only to ATopTech supporting these older versions. The court ruling does not affect ATopTech’s ability to develop, distribute and support current or future versions of the Aprisa software. ATopTech support for versions before 15.10 will continue through March 19, 2017.
About ATopTech
ATopTech, Inc. is the technology leader in IC physical design. ATopTech’s technology offers the fastest time to design closure focused on advanced technology nodes. The use of state-of-the-art multi-threading and distributed processing technologies speeds up the design process, resulting in unsurpassed project completion times. For more information, see ATopTech | We give designers complexity and power-centric optimization
I agree, Synopsys suing then buying a point-tool competitor is a familiar pattern.
Some interesting reading from the court documents where 50+ companies were contacted to purchase ATopTech, 3 made bids, 2 Letters of Intent, the final letter of intent came from a foreign company.
You do not have to go back very far to see other examples of this. Remember when Cadence sued Cooper and Chyan over their use of SKILL API's. The end result was the Cadence acquisition of CCT. I am curious to see how this plays out. It is a very analogous situation. But the lesson might be that if you have really good integration you could be a takeover target.
This is bad for both semiconductor companies and the EDA market, since it suggests that the road to success for new EDA companies is a Catch-22 or extremely narrow, where your integration is just bad enough not to be a target, but good enough to win customers. Given Dan's comments above regarding single-vendor flows, it seems that if the industry continues to support the sue and acquire approach to dealing with competitors, we will end up with an uncomfortable situation that can be resolved only through market regulation.
Semiconductor companies should be alarmed, since this puts a damper on investment in new EDA start-ups, reducing innovation, and making an oligopoly more likely.
Had AtopTech simply not copied the Primetime command names in their Place and Route product, then they would never have been sued and would not be in Chapter 11 bankruptcy now. Synopsys wisely copyrighted their Primetime command names and report output styles. Violating a copyright is always going to end badly when the holder of the copyright has more money to spend on a legal team than you do.
