Cadence Design Systems will acquire AWR Corporation from National Instruments (NI), paying $160 million in cash for the electronic design software (EDA) firm NI acquired for approximately $50 million in 2011. The acquisition, which is expected to close during the first quarter of 2020, will include 110 AWR employees.

AWR is an industry leader in RF/microwave EDA software used to design antennas, active and passive components and systems for wireless applications. AWR’s products include NI AWR Design Environment, Microwave Office, Visual System Simulator, Analog Office, AXIEM and Analyst.

Anirudh Devgan, president of Cadence, said, “Creating differentiated products while reducing cycle time requires a seamless design, simulation and analysis environment. The addition of AWR’s talent and technologies will enable us to provide more integrated and optimized RF design solutions, thereby further accelerating system innovation as we execute our Intelligent System Design strategy.”

The two companies plan to integrate AWR’s RF EDA technology with the Cadence software platforms: Cadence® Allegro® PCB Designer, Virtuoso®, Spectre®, Clarity™ 3D Solver, Celsius™ Thermal Solver and Sigrity™ PowerSI®.

Joseph E. Pekarek, general manager of AWR, said, “By joining forces with Cadence, our goal is to be able to leverage the strength and heritage of the Virtuoso and Allegro platforms along with the AWR Design Environment platform to deliver complete solutions for complex ICs, packages and boards.”

At the same time as the AWR acquisition was announced, Cadence and NI announced a strategic alliance between the two companies. The goal of the alliance is to create an integrated design to test flow, leveraging reusable data and test IP from the design and verification phase to validation and production, similar to the PathWave platform offered by Keysight. The companies said the EDA software will be “tightly connected” with the NI LabVIEW and PXI modular instrumentation systems and semiconductor data platform offered by NI.