A $35 billion mega-merger has bolstered a quiet chip duopoly, bringing attention to a critical link in the semiconductor supply chain. The chip-design software market is highly concentrated, with Synopsys and Cadence capturing around a third of the market each. The growth in chip-design software sales is expected to continue, driven by the race among chipmakers to design better graphics-processing units (GPUs) and the increasing demand for technology firms to train artificial-intelligence models. This trend is shortening the time between releases of new chips, leading to more licensing fees for the software firms and reducing their reliance on a few big chipmaking customers.
Original from www.economist.com