A picture is worth a thousand words, at least to an engineer like me so let’s see what happened in the past 3 months:

EDA Stocks, August 23, 2008
EDA Stocks, August 23, 2008

Mentor is up about 10%, Synopsys down about 16%, Magma down about 18%, finally Cadence down some 30%. Clearly our industry is hurting with three of the top four EDA companies in a downward stock price trend.

From a higher perspective I see that the big three indexes also down from a few percent to almost 10% (S&P, Nasdaq, Dow ). That makes EDA look a little better, although EDA stocks are faring worse than the averages.
Innovation is still needed to automate the toughest emerging problems that chip and system-designers are facing. We need some more “must-have” tools from R&D and soon.