Cadence Flexes Muscle Avant! users may face legal action By R. Goering, M. Santarini, EE Times San Jose, Calif. -- In the wake of a court ruling last week that banned sales of Avant! Corp.'s ArcCell products and ordered a lower court to reconsider its refusal to enjoin the Aquarius product line, Cadence Design Systems has threatened legal action against users of Avant! place-and-route products. Avant! attempted to sidestep the issue by revealing plans to quickly replace Aquarius with a previously unannounced Apollo product line. The U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco overturned a March ruling by the U.S. District Court in San Jose that declined to place an injunction on Avant! products because of the harm it would cause the company. The higher court ordered the District Court to determine whether Aquarius software infringes on Cadence's source code and, if so, to ban sales of the software. Both this civil case and a related criminal case stem from Cadence's accusations of source-code theft. "Any further use of ArcCell and ArcCell XO--and we hope, in the future, Aquarius--is banned by this court ruling," said Joe Costello, Cadence president and chief executive officer, at a Tokyo press conference last week. "We will give them a reasonable amount of time to make the transition. If people do not [make a] transition, we will take legal action to enforce our intellectual property rights." Costello said that Avant! customers will be warned that continued use of ArcCell is illegal, and that there is a "substantial likelihood" that Aquarius will soon be banned. He went on to launch personal attacks against former and current executives at Matsushita and Mitsubishi, both large Avant! customers, for "incredibly incestuous" activities involving purchasing decisions for IC CAD software. Costello predicted a ban on Aquarius "within a month or so." Indeed, Avant!'s prospects in District Court look shaky, given that District Judge Ronald Whyte said in his March ruling that Cadence is likely to prevail with claims that Avant!'s "clean room" procedures to remove tainted code for Aquarius were inadequate. But Avant! apparently has an ace in the hole: Apollo, a new IC-design system that's being quietly developed at the company's North Carolina research facility. Vic Kulkarni, vice president of sales and marketing at Avant!, said Apollo will go to selected beta sites Oct. 1 and be ready for shipment to customers in November. "The effects of this injunction will have no practical effect on us, because we stopped selling ArcCell 15 months ago," said Matt Lifschultz, Avant!'s director of corporate communications. Lifschultz insisted that Aquarius is a different product, and predicted that the District Court will recognize this and rule in Avant!'s favor. Cadence threats against ArcCell users will have no impact, Lifschultz said, because they have all switched to Aquarius. "All they'll find is empty seats," he said. Cadence has argued all along that Aquarius is simply a new name for ArcCell. And Cadence executives expressed incredulity that Avant! could develop a truly new place-and-route system in such a short time. "This is again another shell game of moving from ArcCell to Aquarius to Apollo," said Bob Wiederhold, general manager of Cadence's deep-submicron division. The immediate impact of last week's court decision is that ArcCell and Aquarius users worldwide, who include most of the world's top semiconductor firms, are going to start feeling some heat. "The customers will need a couple of months to change to another place-and-route software," said Cadence CEO Costello. "But any prolonged usage of our stolen property means that we would have to take legal action. "We have been fighting this case for two years, and we have been very disappointed--and in fact shocked--by the customers' response to the matter," he said. "We are not talking about a case that involves esoteric patents. This was an outright theft, multiple thefts, which made it possible for this company to create multiple generations of a product--in fact, the very creation of the company itself." The Cadence chief said that Seiji Miwa, in charge of Cadence's Japan subsidiary, would shortly be meeting with executives of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and other Japanese companies to explain the situation. While the jurisdiction of U.S. courts does not extend to Europe or Japan, Costello said the copyright conventions adhered to by European nations and Japan are essentially the same as in the United States. (Next article) (c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]

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