PCB Chat 158: Wally Rhines on the Latest ECAD Market Data

Andy Shaughnessy (0:12)

Welcome to PCB Chat. I'm Andy Shaughnessy, Content Architect for PCEA.

Here with me today is Wally Rhines. Wally is the spokesperson for the ESD Alliance, which is part of Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International. How are you doing, Wally?

Wally Rhines (0:28)

I'm doing fine, Andy. Good to talk.

Andy Shaughnessy (0:31)

Good to talk to you too.

Wally joins PCB Chat every quarter to share details from the latest ESD Alliance report on sales of computer-aided engineering tools, semiconductor tools, PCB design software, related IP and services and employment. Wally, why don't you just start off by walking us through these results for Q1, which I gotta say look pretty positive. Tell us about it.

Wally Rhines (0:58)

They really were. It's a strong quarter for growth up above the four quarter moving average. The overall growth for total EDA was 12.7% worldwide. Now, if you include IP or if you exclude IP, it's a little lower, but in general, about two points higher than what we've seen, two and a half points higher than the last four quarters. Particular strength in Asia Pacific, although they were coming off a weak compare from a year ago, but even so, that was largely China driven. And then we also had good strength in Europe and modest in Japan, but low double digits, weaker in the US, which is unusual. And in terms of the type of tools, one I know is of interest to your audience is Printed Circuit Board, and Wally Chip Module. That's right along with what it's been in the last several quarters, about half a point higher, just under 5% growth year to year compared to the first quarter of 2025

Very strong growth in CAE, the front end tools, capture simulation, 15.5%. Physical design, much stronger than it has been recently. That's usually a reflection of a lot more integrated circuit design going on. And Semiconductor IP, very strong. You expect that if integrated circuit design is up, then you expect the IP purchases to be up. They were at 14%.

So, overall, quite good growth both geographically as well as by product category.

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Andy Shaughnessy (3:52)

Yeah, it's good to see that PCB was up some. I mean, not huge numbers, but, you know, slow and steady.

Wally Rhines (3:59)

Right. And there are, if you dig within the numbers, of course, we encourage your listeners to subscribe to the reports and get all the detail. Just to give you a little insight into that, within the numbers, while PCB was growing just under 5%, PCB analysis continuously is much stronger. That's 16%. That's right in line with what the moving average has been. Those are tools to do thermal analysis and power analysis, CMI analysis of printed circuit board designs typically.

Another real highlight and a significant one is that package design jumped 46% year to year. Big growth, and I guess a lot of your listeners probably think, yeah, that makes sense. A lot of chiplets, a lot of multi-die layouts on substrates, that kind of thing.

Physical design, a little relatively flat, and the total numbers, and there's another category that pulled down the totals. But overall, I think it's intuitively what you might expect. Strong packaging and strong analysis tools, not so strong schematic capture and layout.

Andy Shaughnessy (5:26)

Yeah, it seems like the analysis segment just keeps on growing. I mean, I guess we're just going to expect to keep seeing that.

Wally Rhines (5:34)

I think it's true. And we've seen EDA companies keep introducing more tools, enhancing those tools because printed circuit board design and package design get closer and closer to IC design as the feature sizes shrink and the onboard frequencies increase. Then we need more and more detailed analysis of noise and thermal effects and how we can improve the power dissipation in a design. And so I expect that that's a long term trend. We'll continue to see more detailed analysis of the system level tool applications.