Software licensing models in the EDA industry

Abstract

The EDA industry offers a wide variety of software licensing models. However, the definitions of these licensing models and their applicability is neither consistent nor commonly understood amongst the EDA vendor and user communities. This paper broadly characterizes each of the common software licensing models in the EDA industry, illustrates the selection of specific licensing models through a set of criteria and case studies, and proposes solutions to some of the common problems with the current software licensing models.