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Premier Farnell has announced an agreement to acquire CadSoft Computer GmbH

Premier Farnell to offer EDA to get closer to engineers

By Peter Clarke

Courtesy of EE Times (09/24/2009 0:17 PM EDT)

LONDON =97 Component distributor Premier Farnell plc (Leeds, England) wants to become a supplier of PCB layout software, including a free-of-charge lightweight edition. This should allow the company to get closer to engineers and to be able to sell chips direct to them from the design tool as it is in use.

Premier Farnell has announced an agreement to acquire CadSoft Computer GmbH, supplier of the Eagle graphical layout editor software, for 7 million euro (about $10.3 million) with an additional sum, not exceeding 5 million euro (about $7.3 million), payable based on subsequent performance. Premier Farnell said that CadSoft has 40,000 electronic design engineers as customers across Europe and the U.S. and it plans to extend the CAD software's capabilities by linking it to product databases.

These provide access to over 4 million items from 3,500 manufacturers, all with data and pricing in local language and currencies.

The high-end version of the CadSoft software handles board sizes to 1.6 meter by 1.6 meter with a resolution of 0.1-micron, 16 signal layers, 999 schematic sheets, and offers semi-automatic routing, Premier Farnell said.

The acquisition is in line with a strategy to provide engineers with technology, information, tools and software while using the internet for international reach, Premier Farnell added.

Reply to
bigbrownbeastie
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On Sep 30, 10:52=A0am, bigbrownbeastie

Oh no :(

Reply to
larwe

Translation pop-up advertising "people who used this also bought..." =20

...

Translation every time you go to add part it will go online and bring up webpages as well.

I have enough issues with Farnell website being slow, bloated and only the 'bleeding edge' versions of any browser to use.

--=20 Paul Carpenter | snipped-for-privacy@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk PC Services Timing Diagram Font GNU H8 - compiler & Renesas H8/H8S/H8 Tiny For those web sites you hate

Reply to
Paul Carpenter

Cadsoft has been of no consequence since they decided to put DRM into their product. Unless Farnell chooses to remove that, it will remain an inconsequential product.

formatting link

Reply to
JeffM

Hehe - Just wait till you try and enter a DigiKey part number ! ;)

Interesting move, looks a 'tail of the curve' sales move, as marketing displaces engineering.

-jg

Reply to
-jg

So, that's around $240/user on that mailing list. They have to hope to get ~$2000+ additional business from all of those users to pay for this ?

-jg

Reply to
-jg

More like $250 per user with their markup!! :(

--

John Devereux
Reply to
John Devereux

If they made it free, ad-supported software, that might not be so bad. One can always spoof Farnell's ad server to local apache at 127.0.0.1. Look forward to the Linux and MacOS versions to be discontinued though.

But I would say this announcement means EAGLE is officially dead and I need to look for a new package when I next need to upgrade.

Reply to
larwe

Easy enough. After you put down the first two or three components, a window with a dancing paperclip in it will pop up and say "Looks like you're designing a Class D audio amplifier! Would you like to paste in the reference design from our preferred vendor and commit to using a sole-source part?"

Reply to
larwe

On Sep 30, 3:52=A0pm, bigbrownbeastie wrote: SNIP

SNIP

SNIP

This is a common plan and desire from most catalogue and big name component distributors.

SNIP

SNIP

You do not have to buy a company to integrate a database, just the right relationship and contracts.

Reply to
bigbrownbeastie

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