REMONT, Calif. -- Avant! Corp.'s placement-and-routing products were once again threatened this week, after the U.S. Court of Appeals (San Francisco) ordered a lower court to halt sales of Avant!'s obsolete ArcCell products and reconsider enjoining the current Aquarius products.

This is just the latest turn in the litigious world of Avant! and Cadence. And while there are many issues at stake for the two combatants--like criminal liability, civil damages, stock price and the ability to compete in the already tricky EDA market--the battle is spilling over into the user community where, like it or not, designers might be forced to take sides for their own good.

Since Avant! no longer sells ArcCell, the immediate impact of the ruling is unclear--to all but Cadence Design Systems (San Jose), that is, which plans to make life difficult not just for Avant!, but for Avant!-software users, as well.

``Any further use of ArcCell and ArcCell XO--and we hope in the future Aquarius--is banned by this court ruling,'' said Cadence CEO Joe Costello, who was in Japan when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit made its ruling. ``This is not just to stop the sale: Customers cannot use the current software that they own. It is not in our interest to hurt our customers or their business. We will go to those customers [of Avant! software]--we've already gone to many of them--and present them with the substantial likelihood that the Aquarius software also will be banned. We will give them a reasonable amount of time to make the transition.''

If customers do not make the switch, Costello said, ``we will take legal action to enforce our intellectual property rights.

``The customers will need a couple of months to change to another place-and route-software,'' he added. ``But any prolonged usage of our stolen property means that we would have to take legal action.''

Cadence is hoping for a speedy injunction against Aquarius, and Jeff Chanin, chief trial counsel for Cadence and attorney at Keker and Van Nest (San Francisco), predicted one could come within the next couple of weeks.

The Appeals Court opinion noted that, while the District Court concluded Cadence is likely to prove that the ``clean room'' was inadequate, it did not state whether its findings related to the copyright-infringement claim or Cadence's claim of misappropriation of trade secrets. The court was thus ordered to go back and determine whether Aquarius infringes Cadence's code, and if so, to issue an injunction.

Meanwhile, when the District Court bans ArcCell, anyone who uses that program could be subject to legal action, according to Cadence. ``The copyright law provides that whenever you load and execute a program you are making a copy of it,'' said Smith McKeithen, vice president and general counsel at Cadence. ``And if a program has been found to have infringed someone else's intellectual property, then the loading and using of that program, by anyone, is an infringing event.''

``The effects of this injunction will have no practical effect on us, because we stopped selling ArcCell 15 months ago,'' said Matt Lifschultz, director of corporate communications at Avant!. Lifschultz said that Aquarius is a different product from ArcCell, and predicted that the U.S. District Court will recognize this and rule in Avant!'s favor.

Lifschulz said all ArcCell users have been switched over to Aquarius anyway. ``All they'll find is empty seats,'' he said.

A Cadence spokesperson expressed doubt that all ArcCell users have actually made the migration, but said the company is unlikely to engage in a ``blanket'' pursuit of ArcCell users. Cadence's actions will be determined on a case-by-case basis, he said.

Avant!, meanwhile, is working overtime to make all this moot with Apollo, a new IC-design system that's being quietly developed at the company's North Carolina research facility. Vic Kulkarni, Avant! vice president of sales and marketing, said Apollo will go to selected beta sites Oct. 1 and be ready for customer shipment in November.

Because Apollo was written by engineers unassociated with previous Avant! place-and-route software, and an ``independent'' clean room was established, there should be no legal questions concerning Apollo, according to a report from analysts Wessels, Arnold and Henderson (Minneapolis). Apollo was described as an all-new placement-and-routing system with a unified database that links in hierarchical verification tools.

Cadence has insisted all along that Aquarius is simply a new name for ArcCell, and company representatives expressed incredulity that Avant! could develop a new place-and-route system in such a short time. ``This is again another shell game of moving from ArcCell to Aquarius to Apollo,'' said Bob Wiederhold, general manager of Cadence's deep-submicron division.

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