"We now need to change the way we license our tools," declared Smith in an interview with EE Times Europe, specifying that Synopsys' aim is to provide its customers with licensing models that best take advantage of multicore than traditional per-CPU licenses.

"We have started a different licensing approach," Smith commented. "In the past, we had one license for every processor. Now, we have introduced a dual-core license, meaning that there is one single license for two cores. This will evolve with the number of cores."

Smith highlighted that Synopsys has adopted this licensing approach for its recently-launched Zroute multi-threaded router integrated into IC compiler.