Industry Summary Articles

EMA Design Automation® has just announced the acquisition of Accelerated Designs, a company known for its dominance in EDA part library content and solutions including a 7.2-million-part database and its specialist library tool Ultra Librarian. "One of the many challenges an electrical engineer faces during the design phase is getting accurate and usable symbols and footprints," said Manny Marcano, president of EMA Design Automation. "Accelerated Designs' library is the world's largest library for EDA symbols and footprints, offering over 7.2 million quality parts to choose from. Additionally, Accelerated Designs offers services to enable any IC vendor to quickly and easily create the EDA library content its customers need when choosing their components."

The acquisition includes all EDA content and software created by Accelerated Designs. "We also hired all of Accelerated Designs' existing personnel, both to retain their expertise and so that existing Accelerated Designs' customers will experience a business-as-usual transition through the change in ownership," said Marcano.

"Becoming part of EMA allows me and my team to focus on our core expertise: EDA part creation, library tools, and services," said Frank Frank, president and CEO of Accelerated Designs. "With EMA's help in marketing and business development, we'll be able to expand our offerings and provide more value to our customers."

In addition to the existing library of parts, Accelerated Designs' Ultra Librarian tool speeds the creation of EDA content for new components. The tool uses the concept of templates to create parts, which increases accuracy, speed, and consistency of part creation and allows global changes to be made to a library. Automation is the key component to the Ultra Librarian tool, allowing a user to build their component accurately one time and then export it to the CAD tool(s) of their choice.

"Digi-Key partnered with Accelerated Designs in 2015 to provide the unique ability to generate symbols and footprints in the specific format for nearly any EDA tool," said Randall Restle, Digi-Key vice-president of applications engineering. "This allows our customers to quickly and easily design in new parts or even obtain customized libraries from a pool of hundreds of thousands of Digi-Key's parts, indexed with a Digi-Key part number, and compatible with their EDA tool. Our successful history with both EMA and Accelerated Designs encourages me that the combination will be a positive change for Digi-Key and our customers."

Symbol and Footprint generation has always been a void in the market. EDA vendors have largely ignored it as they need to focus on the features of the EDA toolset. "EMA now owns a tremendous wealth of symbol and footprint content, and my goal is to rapidly evolve the Accelerated Designs library to be the ‘Gold Standard' for the EDA industry," said Marcano.

To view the original press release, please click here.

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