Synopsys Completes Acquisition of Ansys, Creating a Comprehensive EDA and FEA Family

The deal was first announced in January 2024; it was wrapped up this month. Synopsys has now completed the acquisition of Ansys, giving birth to a new leader with offerings that cover silicon design, semiconductor intellectual property, FEA, CFD, electronics, materials intelligence, embedded software, and more. 

Ansys stockholders swiftly approved the sales in May 2024, but the transaction ran into delays, due to the Chinese regulators' review process and the U.S.'s new regulations on EDA (electronic design automation) technology sales to China. But in June, China approved the sales, clearing the major roadblock.

Sassine Ghazi, President and CEO of Synopsys, said, "The increasing complexity of developing intelligent systems demands design solutions with a deeper integration of electronics and physics, enhanced by AI. With Ansys’ leading system simulation and analysis solutions now part of Synopsys, we can maximize the capabilities of engineering teams broadly, igniting their innovation from silicon to systems."|

The $35 billion Synopsys paid for Ansys made the merger one of the biggest deals in EDA and FEA (finite element analysis). The price tag surpassed Siemens' acquisitions of Altair for $10 billion in March 2025 and EDA software maker Mentor Graphics for 4.5 billion in November 2016.

These deals point to continued consolidation among the major players in EDA and FEA. Cadence's acquisitions of Pointwise and NUMECA, both CFD technology developers, and Siemens acquisition of Mentor Graphics are in the same category. In fact, before it was snatched up by an EDA giant, Ansys also acquired a smaller EDA company, Ansoft, in 2008. 

"The trend to become more vertically integrated is not new and has been going on since before Autodesk made its first acquisition. It's called filling out the stack. NVIDIA and AMD have been doing that in their space. Bentley is probably the king of the practice," noted Jon Peddie, President of JPR. "Ansys is a bit of a departure because it is a pure software company, and it is a signal that Synopsys has a bigger view and ambition than its traditional activities."

The design and simulation of mechanical systems and that of semiconductors, silicon, and chips are related, but kept separated by the different software tools and file formats involved. And the number of key players in each sector is shrinking, in a large part due to consolidation that has already taken place.

"If growth is the mandate, then they have to look elsewhere for expansion," said Peddie, suggesting titans in FEA and EDA are now looking across the fence for buying opportunities.