Why You Really Need Chip-package co-analysis
There's only one software company that I know of that covers four major disciplines: Fluids, Structures, Electronics and Systems. That company is ANSYS and when they acquired Apache Design Automation back in 2011 they filled out their products for electronics design, and more specifically in the area of integrated chip-package co-analysis. I just reviewed a presentation from ANSYS given at DAC back in June titled, Achieving Faster Power Design Closure with Integrated Chip-Package Co-analysis. The historic approach in EDA was to have separate tools for the IC designer, package designer and PCB designer, leading to silos of data that didn't easily talk to each other, let alone do any co-analysis. Apache saw the opportunity and basically created a new category of EDA tool to support integrated chip-package co-analysis.