NETANYA, Israel — EDA supplier Cadence Design Systems Inc, is set to expand a European startup accelerator program into the U.S. and the Far East. The program, formally launched in June, helps entrepreneurs find foundries, raise money from venture capitalists and partner with intellectual property (IP) and hardware providers, while maximizing their business with Cadence.

The foundries in the program include TSMC, UMC and SMIC while the IP core vendors include ARM Holdings plc, ARC International plc, MIPS Technology Inc. and Chipidea Microelectronics SA. Venture capital firms include Pond Venture Partners Ltd., Jerusalem Venture Partners and Atlas Ventures.

"Cadence actively participates in the startup’s chip development, shortens its time to first silicon and helps the design’s ecosystem become much more proactive. During this process, we consolidate the startup’s EDA tools in a way that makes Cadence the only provider, which reduces the total price for the startup," Erez Tsur, Cadence director of market development for Europe, Middle East and Africa at told EETimes. Tsur heads the co-operation program in Europe and Israel.

"Our program does the technological due diligence, while the VCs do the business due diligence," said Tsur. "At the end of this process, my report clarifies whether the design is valid, details the results of the feasibility test and proposes ways to partner with other organizations that often don’t know what to do with the entrepreneurs."

The Cadence program helped the entrepreneurs at Altair Semiconductor (Hod Hasharon, Israel), which develops a WiMAX chip, find a fab and raise money from JVP, said Tsur. Mobile phone chip developer Air Semiconductor (Swindon, England), worked with Cadence to help it obtain funding from Pond Ventures.

Cadence has been partnering with startups since 1999, but the current program formally connects numerous small companies to their various business partners within a clear business model.

During Ray Bingham’s time as Cadence CEO, the company would occasionally take some equity in startups, such as TransChip (San Jose, California), instead of exacting the full price of its EDA tools, but Mike Fister, current CEO of Cadence, favors the new startup accelerator program, which basically replaces the equity policy.

Mentor Graphics and Synopsys have also been partnering with European startups. Mentor’s start-ups program, named Cre8Ventures, for example, supplies tools and helps start-ups find investors, managers and customers. Synopsys, for its part, has helped startups such as picoChip Ltd. (Bristol, England) choose design partners and professional service suppliers.