Coordinates: 37°23′32″N 122°02′50″W / 37.3921°N 122.0471°W / 37.3921; -122.0471

Synopsys, Inc., an American company, is the leading company by sales in the Electronic Design Automation industry. Synopsys' first and best-known product is Design Compiler, a logic-synthesis tool. Synopsys offers a wide range of other products used in the design of an application-specific integrated circuit. Products include logic synthesis, behavioral synthesis, place and route, static timing analysis, formal verification, hardware description language (SystemC, SystemVerilog/Verilog, VHDL) simulators as well as transistor-level circuit simulation. The simulators include development and debugging environments which assist in the design of the logic for chips and computer systems.

Founded in 1986 by Aart J. de Geus and engineers from General Electric's Microelectronics Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, Synopsys was first established as "Optimal Solutions" with a charter to develop and market synthesis technology developed by the team at General Electric.

ARC International PLC was the designer of ARC (Argonaut RISC Core) embedded processors, which were widely used in SoC devices for IoT, storage, digital home, mobile, and automotive applications. ARC processors have been licensed by more than 200 companies and are shipped in more than 1.5 Billion products per year. ARC International was acquired by Synopsys in 2010.

The roots of ARC International date back to the early 1990s. The company was founded by Jez San to build upon the 3D accelerator technology previously developed for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System by a division of Argonaut Software. This forerunner to the ARC was originally called the Mario (Mathematical, Argonaut, Rotation & I/O) chip and later dubbed the Super FX. It went on to sell millions, at the time outselling ARM or any other RISC core.

Following the success of the Super FX, its designers were split from the main company to a subsidiary called Argonaut Technology Ltd (ATL). The design was renamed to ARC and marketed as a general-purpose configurable microprocessor. Later, ATL spun off as a separate company, ARC International. In 1995 Bob Terwilliger took over as ARC's first CEO. He created the company licensing strategy, commercialized the product including the acquisition of Metaware, VAutomation and Precise Software. He raised $50 million pre-IPO and took the company public in September 2000, raising an additional $250 million.

A list of notable events following:

Avanti Corporation (the 'i' in "Avanti" is upside down, so it is also often seen as Avant!) was an electronic design automation company, purchased by Synopsys in 2002 (see wikt:avanti for the meaning of the word).

Clarified Networks is a company that is headquartered in Oulu, Finland. The company was acquired by Codenomicon in 2011, but continues to operate as a separate company under the Codenomicon Group.

The company is most famous for producing visualizations of security incidents, for example the patching of DNS cache poisoning attacks and Botnet traffic.

Since 2006 Clarified Networks has in particular concentrated in developing the collaborative focus in their products and currently refers to itself as a provider of Collaborative Network Analysis tools. Practical applications for Clarified Networks' tools are for example Traffic Auditing, troubleshooting and malware analysis.

Clarified Networks provides a wide set of different situation awareness tools, including:

Virtual Situation Room (VSRoom) provides unified, real-time views to the information provided by your monitoring systems. With VSRoom you will be able to collect, visualize and share monitoring data collected from your critical infrastructure. It provides beautiful situation overviews of complex data for decision makers and first line operation centers.

AbuseHelper is an open framework for collecting and sharing intelligence on suspected malicious activity. Clarified Networks is the lead developer and community contributor of AbuseHelper.

Network Analyzer is the tool of choice for collaborative analysis and visualization of complex networks. The analyzer helps you in collaborative troubleshooting, traffic audits and network documentation based on real traffic.

The research and development for Clarified Networks' tools began in 2002 and continued for four years in the Oulu University Secure Programming Group (OUSPG) before Clarified Networks spun off from the research group in 2006.

The company entered the Venture Cup competition that year, and was one of the finalists.

In 2007, the founders of Clarified Networks also were awarded for their VMware Applicance called HowNetWorks.

In 2011, Company was acquired by Codenomicon.

CoWare, now part of Synopsys, was a supplier of platform-driven electronic system-level (ESL) design software and services. CoWare was headquartered in San Jose, California, and had offices around the world, major R&D offices in Belgium, Germany and India.

CoWare development was initiated by the Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (IMEC) in Belgium as an internal project in 1992. In 1996, CoWare spun off as an independent company. CoWare is one of the founding member of SystemC language In 2005, CoWare acquired the Signal Processing department from Cadence. On February 8, 2010, Synopsys has announced an acquisition of CoWare.

Its products included : Platform Architect, Model Designer, Model Library, Processor Designer, Signal Processing Designer and Virtual Platform Designer.

Novas Software (often referred to as "Novas") was a company founded in 1996 by Dr. Paul Huang to address the ongoing problem of debugging chip designs. Novas was purchased by Taiwan-based EDA company SpringSoft in May 2008. Prior to its purchase, Novas was partly owned by SpringSoft, which developed the underlying debug technology. Until 2008, Novas grew to employ over 50 people with office locations across the world, headquartered in San Jose, California. SpringSoft and Novas was acquired by Synopsys in 2012.

Novas offered debugging and visibility enhancement products that cut down on verification time. Novas' main product offerings included the Debussy Debug System, Verdi Automated Debug System and the Siloti family of Visibility Enhancement products. A 2006 study found Novas Software to be the sixth most-used EDA vendor. Along with this, Novas Software topped the user satisfaction ratings with 100% of respondents in Europe, 83% in North America & 69% in Asia saying they were either "very" or "somewhat" satisfied. This distinction was also awarded to Novas Software for the four years prior to 2006.

Numerical Technologies, Inc. was a San Jose, California, United States based EDA public (NASDAQ: NMTC) company. The company was primarily known for its IP portfolio, software tools and services covering alternating Phase Shift Mask (alt-PSM) Technology providing sub-wavelength design to manufacturing solutions.

On January 10, 2000 Numerical Technologies acquired Transcription Enterprises, Inc. primarily known for its CATS software for mask data preparation,

On October 27, 2000 Numerical Technologies acquired Cadabra Design Automation, Inc. (Cadabra), a provider of automated IC layout cell creation technology used to create the building blocks for standard cell, semi-custom and custom integrated circuits. Purchase price: $99 million

On March 3, 2003 it was acquired by Synopsys.

SpringSoft is a software company that developed VLSI design and debugging software. The company was founded with a grant from the Taiwanese National Science Council in February 1996.

In 1997, SpringSoft established Novas Software in Silicon Valley to market Springsoft's VLSI Debugging software. SpringSoft created a custom layout tool called Laker and a US-based company called Silicon Canvas. In May 2008, SpringSoft purchased Novas Software Silicon Canvas and combined them to form the wholly owned subsidiary SpringSoft USA. SpringSoft employed over 400 people with office locations across the world.

Synopsys announced its acquisition of SpringSoft in 2012.

Synplicity Inc. was a supplier of software solutions for design of programmable logic devices (FPGAs, PLDs and CPLDs) used for communications, military/aerospace, consumer, semiconductor, computer and other electronic systems. Synplicity’s tools provided logic synthesis, physical synthesis, and verification functions for FPGA, FPGA-based ASIC prototyping, and DSP designers. Synplicity was listed on Nasdaq until it was acquired by Synopsys for $227 million in a transaction finalized May 15, 2008. Synplicity was founded by Ken McElvain (Chief Technical Officer) and Alisa Yaffa (former CEO).

Coverity was a provider of software development tools. Coverity's tools operated via Static and Dynamic software analysis, and were capable of finding defects related to security, stability, and testing. In February 2014, Coverity announced an agreement to be acquired by Synopsys, for $350 million net of cash on hand.

In November 2016, Synopsys acquired Cigital, a software security firm that specializes in source-code static analysis and penetration testing.