[nudgeee]

Interesting, wonder if Renasas can push Altium past Zuken in the Japanese market, or if this is their play to capture more markets outside of Japan.

[vrinsd]

Which is weird because modern Zuken tools look really intelligent designed. I haven't tried them since they ran on Sun workstations but CR-8000 looks impressive.

[nudgeee]

Indeed, Zuken is still a large player in Japan, and has a leg up with IC packaging tools which the big players (Cadence, Mentor) have that Altium doesn’t.

Altium’s play has always been to segment the market at the hobby+small enterprise+startup level, with aim to push further up to larger enterprises as those companies grow. They’re taking aim at the next gen EE/design engineers as the graybeards age out of the industry. Let’s see if this strategy holds out with Renesas positioned above.