ECAD, Inc.
defunct American software company
ECAD, Inc., based in Santa Clara, California, was an early vendor of electronic design automation software. The company was best known for its design rule checking product Dracula, but also produced IC layout and PC layout software. Eventually, in a merger with SDA, it became Cadence Design Systems.
ECAD history
ECAD was founded in August 1982 by Paul Huang, Ping Chao, and Glen M. Antle, who had worked at Texas Instruments, ITT, Teledyne, Data General, and (just before founding ECAD), the microelectronics products division of Systems Engineering Laboratories (SEL) in Sunnyvale, California. While developing a new computer design at SEL, the CAD group wrote a new (and very fast) algorithm for Design rule checking (DRC). These ideas eventually became the basis of ECAD's products.
In 1982, SEL was acquired by Gould Inc., and part of the CAD group spun out as ECAD.
ECAD's first product was Dracula, introduced in April 1983. It included a design-rule checker, an electrical rule checker, and a layout-versus-schematic consistency checker among other programs. This was followed by SYMBAD, an IC layout product suite.
ECAD sold only software, an unusual business tactic at this time.
“ECAD, Inc.” enters the record as defunct American software company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what ECAD, defunct and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Stable identifiers, scientific names and standards terminology offer the best bridge between this overview and specialist evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5322629. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1982 and 1983.
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This entry incorporates text from “ECAD, Inc.” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.