Altium’s Judy Warner Discusses the Challenges of EDA Tool Licensing with Freedom CAD’s Scott Miller & Scott McCurdy
EDA Tool Licensing can vary greatly between different tools, some offer subscription licenses while others offer perpetual (or both). There can be many challenges when trying to juggle demand across multiple tools, Altium’s Judy Warner interviews Freedom CAD’s COO, Scott Miller, and Director of Sales and Marketing, Scott McCurdy, about how FCS acquires and uses various EDA software platforms. Below is a snippet, click here to read the full article.
Scott Miller is the COO of Freedom CAD, possibly the largest privately held design service bureau in the country. Freedom CAD is based in Nashua, New Hampshire, but their designers are based throughout the US. Scott McCurdy is the director of sales and marketing. McCurdy is based in southern California and is also the president of the largest IPC Designers Council chapter in the country. I had the pleasure to learn from these two industry veterans about how a design service bureau acquires and uses various EDA software platforms.
Miller explained that they use Cadence, Mentor, and Altium software. The tool set is generally determined by their customers who specify the platform based on their internal tool set, making later changes and re-spins seamless. Freedom CAD uses both perpetual and subscription licenses. They use the “EDA card” offered by Cadence, which helps them estimate their (large) annual spend that allows them to bundle various tools and qualifies them for a volume discount due to multiple seats and feature usage including associated maintenance fees.