> According to Cadence’s admissions and court documents, employees of Cadence China did not disclose to and/or concealed from other Cadence personnel, including Cadence’s export compliance personnel, that exports to CSCC were in fact intended for delivery to NUDT and/or the PRC military. For example, in May 2015, a few months after NUDT was added to the Entity List, Cadence’s then-head of sales in China emailed colleagues, cautioning them to refer to their customer as CSCC in English and NUDT only in Chinese characters, writing that “the subject [was] too sensitive.”
Interesting. Sounds like Cadence China employees went rogue. Nonetheless, Cadence USA is on the hook.
True, fines should be significantly higher for corporate malfeasance. Give them a $1 billion fine and they will start to consider but maybe they should change their behavior.
Or should target the actual perpetrators and not the company. Some executive somewhere is seeing this as a win in the cost of doing business and has no disincentive to do criminal business in the future. But if they were fined themselves then they wouldn’t be so bold.
The amount they seem to have made from the offence is 45 million, so the fine is twice that plus some more. I guess the idea is that you fine them enough that this particular business they’re doing is no longer feasible and hope they drop it.
The fine doesn’t need to be a significant portion of their earnings, just like a parking ticket needn’t be a significant portion of your wealth. It just needs to be high enough that the action that caused it makes them less than the act of not doing that.
Their market cap is irrelevant here. What's more relevant is how much they made from the illegal export. For instance, it makes zero sense to fine Chipotle (market cap: $57B) a few billion, or even a few million dollars for health code violations in one of its restaurants, just because its market cap is in the tens of billions.
Fines should absolutely be proportional to the income of the entity being fined.
Not only should they be proportional but they should have an exponentially increasing rate for reoffense of the same or similar crime with a cooling off period for the escalation of a year or two.
Fines should never be a 'cost of doing business's for anyone. They should sting and dissuade offenders from reoffending.
EDA vendors know this is a risk, so EDA tools constantly need to "phone back home" to load updates and validate licenses. Plenty of functionality falls apart as well without that connectivity or support.
Furthermore, the resources that you would need to spend constantly cracking newer versions just isn't worth it when similar capital could be spent building home grown alternatives.
Finally, cracking and building a clone does cause liability risks for Chinese companies attempting to expand abroad. Companies are companies first - even in China - and the appetite for Huawei getting completely blocked from all of the EU, Singapore, SK, JP, India, etc where both the large EDA vendors and Chinese vendors coexist makes it a proposition that isn't worth it.
> Furthermore, the resources that you would need to spend constantly cracking newer versions just isn't worth it when similar capital could be spent building home grown alternatives.
Zero of these programs have any level of copy protection remotely resembling Denuvo: no virtualization, debug symbols are commonly left intact.
> EDA tools constantly need to "phone back home" to load updates and validate licenses
This isn't true in my experience. Cadence, Synopsys, and Siemens tools all use local license files or license servers (mainly FlexLM). Updates are just downloaded from their website.
So what's the secret sauce that cadence is not allowed to sell to personas non gratas? The article just says EDA tools but that's so broad. Is KiCAD export restricted?
For EDA, gate-all-around technologies used in 2nm processes are banned from export by ITAR. This applies to device electrical modeling as well as physical design layout rules. You won’t find these GAA in KiCAD or OpenROAD.
I think for this case though it was specifically because Cadence sold a commercial product to a banned entity, instead of anything technology related.
Is this actually because of legal requirements, or because of reality?
Nobody with access to a bleeding-edge node is using vastly inferior FOSS tools that can't actually work with a brand new fab PDK (which was produced specifically for Synopsys or Cadence tools.)
If you read the article, you will see that the technology is specifically semiconductor design tools required for developing high performance computing that the PRC would use for nuclear weapons development. Can you do that with KiCAD? No.
The parent's question still seems applicable. Is this basically down to a judge to decide the line at which a certain technology is too advanced to export? Would open sourcing an EDA tool be illegal if it was sufficiently capable?
Hmm... I wonder who the CEO of Cadence was at the time, and what company he is the current CEO of. If only Board of Directors actually did some due diligence.
Readit News
Interesting. Sounds like Cadence China employees went rogue. Nonetheless, Cadence USA is on the hook.
$100B Cadence: it wasn't very effective
The fine doesn’t need to be a significant portion of their earnings, just like a parking ticket needn’t be a significant portion of your wealth. It just needs to be high enough that the action that caused it makes them less than the act of not doing that.
Not only should they be proportional but they should have an exponentially increasing rate for reoffense of the same or similar crime with a cooling off period for the escalation of a year or two.
Fines should never be a 'cost of doing business's for anyone. They should sting and dissuade offenders from reoffending.
Furthermore, the resources that you would need to spend constantly cracking newer versions just isn't worth it when similar capital could be spent building home grown alternatives.
Finally, cracking and building a clone does cause liability risks for Chinese companies attempting to expand abroad. Companies are companies first - even in China - and the appetite for Huawei getting completely blocked from all of the EU, Singapore, SK, JP, India, etc where both the large EDA vendors and Chinese vendors coexist makes it a proposition that isn't worth it.
Zero of these programs have any level of copy protection remotely resembling Denuvo: no virtualization, debug symbols are commonly left intact.
This isn't true in my experience. Cadence, Synopsys, and Siemens tools all use local license files or license servers (mainly FlexLM). Updates are just downloaded from their website.
I think for this case though it was specifically because Cadence sold a commercial product to a banned entity, instead of anything technology related.
Is this actually because of legal requirements, or because of reality?
Nobody with access to a bleeding-edge node is using vastly inferior FOSS tools that can't actually work with a brand new fab PDK (which was produced specifically for Synopsys or Cadence tools.)
The parent's question still seems applicable. Is this basically down to a judge to decide the line at which a certain technology is too advanced to export? Would open sourcing an EDA tool be illegal if it was sufficiently capable?
I call that EDA for brevity
> Can you do that with KiCAD?
Yes, depending how you define "high performance computing" (my question here)
"These exports or reexports included the following transactions between 2015 and 2020:
a) Ten (10) sales and exports of EDA hardware, including items classified under ECCN 3B991b.2.c;
b) Seventeen (17) sales and exports or reexports of EDA software, including items classified under ECCN 3D991 or designated EAR99;
c) Seven (7) sales and exports or reexports of semiconductor design technology, specifically IP, including items classified under ECCN 3E991; and
d) Twenty-Two (22) loans and exports of EDA hardware, including items classified under ECCN 3B991b.2.c and items designated EAR99 "