China’s EDA startup X-Epic forced to lay off staff, says report
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Chinese EDA software startup X-Epic Ltd. (Nanjing, China) is cutting up to half its staff according to the South China Morning Post, quoting unnamed sources.
The exact reason for the lay-offs was not given but the SCMP said that Chinese EDA firms saw their business slow in 1Q24 amid broader market headwinds. It is possible that privately held X-Epic is not yet profitable and needs to trim its burn rate.
The company has started cutting jobs in its R&D group the SCMP reported. The company is reported to have about 400 staff working in offices across the major cities in China; Nanjing, Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Shenzhen, as of March 2023.
X-Epic was founded in March 2020 by Wang Libin, an engineer previously with EDA giant Cadence Design Systems Inc., with a mission to develop EDA tools and help bring self-sufficiency to China’s chip industry. X-Epic’s focus has been on verification of complex IC designs for 5G, AI, cloud services and high-performance computing. The company has raised US$122 million to date, according to Pitchbook.
X-Epic and Empyrean Technology are two EDA companies heavily backed by the Chinese investors to try and break free of Cadence, Synopsys and Siemens, the three firms that lead the sector.
While the effective ban by the US government on exporting gate-all-around (GAA) capable EDA tools to China in 2022 might have been expected to help X-Epic, a similar restriction on access to leading-edge external foundry services and semiconductor manufacturing equipment may have effectively put a ceiling on Chinese chip design.
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