Santa Cruz, Calif. — No one can say Ivan Pesic doesn't think big. The outspoken founder and CEO of Silvaco International Inc. expects to be running a new company that will become the No. 1 full-line electronic design automation provider within a few years — with no venture capital money and few if any acquisitions.

Silvaco last week announced the spin-off of Simucad Design Automation Inc., which will sell the analog/mixed-signal IC design tools developed by Silvaco. Simucad's stated intent is to go for an initial public offering in the fourth quarter, to add digital synthesis and placement and routing in 2007, and to become the No. 1 provider of simulation and IC physical-design tools.

"In four or five years there will be only two [full-line] CAD guys left," said Pesic, who is also the CEO of Simucad. "I tell you one thing. It's going to be Simucad and whoever is the second guy."

Bold claims indeed, but Pesic's past suggests a remarkable resolve. In 1984 Pesic started Silvaco on his own, and financed it by running an auto body shop on the side for five years. Over the years, Silvaco became a significant provider of technology-CAD (TCAD) and Spice simulation tools. Pesic owns it, and Simucad, lock, stock and barrel — no debts, no bank loans, no venture capitalists.

A fierce competitor in the courtroom as well as the marketplace, Pesic won legal battles with Technology Modeling Associates (TMA) and MetaSoftware, ultimately collecting $20 million from Avanti Corp. following its purchase of MetaSoftware. More recently, he won a lawsuit against Circuit Semantics Inc., which, according to a court judgment, used Silvaco trade secrets in its DynaSpice product.

Today, Pesic is suing some of Silicon Valley's largest companies — including Intel, Agilent, Cypress, Cirrus, AMD, Specular Networks, NetLogic Microsystems, AMCC and Tvia — alleging they continue to use DynaSpice, which he calls a stolen version of Silvaco's SmartSpice.

What if these companies decline to purchase Simucad products? "I really don't care," Pesic said. "There are 900 companies in this Valley. People buy my software because it's the best." Pesic, in fact, looks forward to bringing one or more of the defendant companies to court, "so we can send a very clear message that stealing software is not cool."

Simucad is starting life with a revenue run rate of around $35 million a year. While financial analysts say that's on the low end for an IPO, Pesic says that's no problem; he expects the run rate to be up to $60 million by September. Unless he reaches that target, he said, he won't do the IPO.

That's a big leap in a single calendar year, but it will be "very easy," Pesic said. "In the last two years we worked night and day, and now we have all the new products in place," he said.

While Silvaco will keep the TCAD tools, Simucad will get everything else, including the SmartSpice, Harmony and SmartSpice RF simulation tools; Silos Verilog simulator; AccuCell and AccuCore library characterization tools; Expert layout editor; and Hipex parasitic extractor.

SmartSpice and Silvaco received several accolades from users in an E-mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG) mailing last year. Several users lauded SmartSpice's performance, accuracy and considerably lower price than competing products from Synopsys Inc. and Cadence Design Systems Inc. "Ivan [Pesic] sells good tools cheap, and he provides good support too," concluded ESNUG moderator John Cooley. "Maybe not so crazy, this Ivan."

A native of Yugoslavia, Pesic came to Silicon Valley 30 years ago, where he earned MS and PhD degrees from Santa Clara University. When he was a CAD manager at Monolithic Memories, he decided to start an EDA company and figured he could do better than Daisy Systems, Valid Logic or Mentor Graphics. But he had also taken MBA classes at Stanford University, and was so shocked by the "arrogance" of venture capitalists that he decided to avoid them completely.

Pesic launched Silvaco in 1984 with Utmost, a still-existing tool that provides parameter extraction, device characterization and modeling. To raise money, he ran an automobile body shop, and found that fixing 50 to 60 cars a week generated enough to run a five-person engineering company. "That was hard," he said. "I was eight hours a day in the body shop and 10 hours in Silvaco, every day, including Saturdays, because that's when we delivered the cars." In 1988, Pesic sold the body shop. A year later Silvaco entered the TCAD business because it was a new market, Pesic said. But there was a TCAD provider, Technology Modeling Associates. In 1991 TMA sued Silvaco, accusing it of going through TMA's Dumpster to find trade secrets.