Item 1. Business
Company and Segment Overview
Synopsys, Inc. (Synopsys, we, our or us) provides products and services used across the entire Silicon to Software spectrum to bring Smart Everything to life. From engineers creating advanced semiconductors to product teams developing advanced electronic systems to software developers seeking to ensure the security and quality of their code, our customers trust that our technologies will enable them to meet new requirements for energy efficiency, reliability, mobility, security and more.
We are a global leader in supplying the electronic design automation (EDA) software that engineers use to design and test integrated circuits (ICs), also known as chips or silicon. We provide software and hardware used to validate the electronic systems that incorporate chips and the software that runs on them, including cloud-based digital design flow to boost chip-design development productivity. We also provide technical services and support to help our customers develop advanced chips and electronic systems. These products and services are part of our Design Automation segment.
We also offer a broad and comprehensive portfolio of semiconductor intellectual property (IP) products, which are pre-designed circuits that engineers use as components of larger chip designs rather than designing those circuits themselves. These products and services are part of our Design IP segment.
We are also a leading provider of software tools and services that improve the security, quality and compliance of software in a wide variety of industries, including electronics, financial services, automotive, medicine, energy and industrials. These tools and services are part of our Software Integrity segment.
Corporate Information
We incorporated in 1986 in North Carolina and reincorporated in 1987 in Delaware. Our headquarters are located at 675 Almanor Avenue, Sunnyvale, California 94085, and our headquarters' telephone number is (650) 584-5000. Our website is https://www.synopsys.com/. We have approximately 122 offices worldwide.
Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, Proxy Statements, including those relating to our Annual Meeting of Stockholders, and any amendments to such reports or other information filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Exchange Act are available through the Investor Relations page of our website (https://investor.synopsys.com/overview/default.aspx) free of charge as soon as reasonably practicable after we file them with, or furnish them to, the SEC (www.sec.gov). We use our Investor Relations page as a routine channel for distribution of important information, including, among other things, news releases, investor presentations and financial information and to comply with our disclosure obligations under Regulation Fair Disclosure. The contents of our website are not part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K and shall not be deemed incorporated by reference.
Background
In this era of Smart Everything, we have seen a remarkable proliferation of consumer and wireless electronic products, particularly mobile devices. The growth of the Internet and cloud computing has provided people with new ways to create, store, and share information. At the same time, the increasing use of electronics in cars, buildings, appliances, and other consumer products is creating a connected landscape of smart devices. Numerous software applications have been developed to expand the potential of these connected devices. The increasing impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning is driving an increase in the activity of new and existing chip and system design companies around the world.
These developments have been enabled by innovation in the semiconductor and software industries. It is now common for a single chip to combine many components (processor, communications, memory, custom logic, input/output) and embedded software into a single system-on-chip (SoC), necessitating highly complex chip designs. The most complex chips today contain more than a billion transistors. Transistors are the basic building blocks for ICs, each of which may have features that are less than 1/1,000th the diameter of a human hair.
These devices are manufactured using masks to direct beams of light onto a wafer of silicon. At such small dimensions, the wavelength of light itself can become an obstacle to production, proving too big to create such
dense features and requiring creative and complicated new approaches. Designers have turned to new manufacturing techniques to solve these problems, such as multiple-patterning lithography, FinFET 3D transistors and Gate-All-Around Field-Effect transistor structures, which in turn have introduced new challenges to design and production.
The popularity of mobile devices and other electronic products has increased demand for chips and systems with greater functionality and performance, reduced size, and lower power consumption. Our customers, who design those products, are facing intense pressure to deliver innovative offerings in shorter timeframes and at lower prices. In other words, innovation in chip and systems design often hinges on providing products "better," "sooner," and "cheaper" than competitors. The design of these chips and systems is extremely complex and necessitates state-of-the-art solutions. Over the past several years, market verticals including AI, 5G, automotive and cloud computing infrastructure have contributed to the ongoing demand for our products and services.
A similar dynamic is at work in the software arena, whether the software is embedded on a chip or used in other applications. The pace of innovation often requires developers to deliver more secure, high-quality software, which can include millions of lines of code, in increasingly frequent release cycles. Bugs, defects and security vulnerabilities in code can be difficult to detect and expensive to fix. Despite these challenges, it is crucial to have high-quality, secure code to ensure consumers' privacy and safety, especially at a time when software is critical in many industries across a growing array of smart devices.
Our Role-As the Silicon to Software Partner
Synopsys' Silicon to Software technologies and services are designed to help our customers-chip and system engineers and software developers-speed up time to market, achieve the highest quality of results, mitigate risk, and maximize profitability.
Chip and systems designers must determine how best to design, locate and connect the building blocks of chips, and to verify that the resulting design behaves as intended and can be manufactured efficiently and cost-effectively. This is a complex, multi-step process that is expensive and time-consuming. Our wide range of products help at different steps in the overall design process, from the design of individual ICs to the design of larger systems. Our products increase designer productivity and efficiency by automating tasks, keeping track of large amounts of data, adding intelligence to the design process, facilitating reuse of past designs and reducing errors. Our IP products offer proven, high-quality pre-configured circuits that are ready to use in a chip design, saving customers time and enabling them to direct resources to features that differentiate their products. Our global service and support engineers provide expert technical support and design assistance to our customers.
Software developers are responsible for writing code that not only accomplishes its goals as efficiently as possible but also runs securely and is free of defects. We offer products that can help developers write higher quality, more secure code by analyzing code for quality defects and known security vulnerabilities, adding intelligence and automation to the software testing process, and helping to eliminate defects in a systematic manner. As developers make use of open source software in their code, our products can help developers better manage the composition and security of the code. Our products enable software developers to catch flaws earlier in the development cycle, when they are less costly to fix.
Products and Services
Design Automation Segment
Our Design Automation segment includes the EDA and Other revenue groups.
EDA
Designing ICs involves many complex steps, including, among others architecture definition, register transfer level (RTL) design, functional/RTL verification, logic design or synthesis, gate-level verification, floorplanning, place and route, and physical verification. Designers use our EDA products to automate the IC design process, reduce errors and enable more powerful and robust designs.
As the availability and amount of cloud-based data storage grows, customer interest in accessing EDA on the cloud is also increasing as customers seek to benefit from the scalability and flexibility that cloud computing can offer to their flows and engineering teams. While many of our solutions have been used in cloud-based environments for years, such as in a customer's own server and/or cloud environment, in fiscal 2022 we launched a Synopsys Cloud
offering that provides customers additional options for accessing our EDA products in their own cloud environments and in the industry's first EDA Software-as-a-Service solution developed in partnership with Microsoft Azure.
Our solutions comprehensively address the design process, featuring a large number of EDA products that generally fall into the following categories:
•Digital and custom IC design and field programmable gate array (FPGA) design, which includes software tools to design, verify, implement and prepare an IC for manufacturing;
•Verification, which includes technology to verify that an IC design behaves as intended;
•Manufacturing, which includes products that both enable early manufacturing process development and convert IC design layouts into the masks used to manufacture the chips; and
•AI driven EDA solutions, which include AI and machine learning tools to complement our EDA software stack.
Digital and Custom IC Design
Our Digital Design Family provides customers with a comprehensive digital design implementation solution that includes industry-leading products and redefines conventional design tool boundaries to deliver a more integrated flow than ever before, with better quality and time to results. The platform gives designers the flexibility to integrate internally developed tools as well as those from third parties. With innovative technologies, a common foundation, and flexibility, our Digital Design Family helps reduce design times, decrease uncertainties in design steps, and minimize the risks inherent in advanced, complex IC design. The platform supports multiple technology nodes, including advanced nodes at 12nm, 10nm, 8/7nm, 6 nm, 5/4nm, and 3nm, with technology collaborations on next-generation process technologies.
Key design products are available as part of the Digital Design Family and include Fusion Compiler RTL to GDSII design implementation, Design Compiler® logic synthesis, IC Compiler II physical design, Synopsys TestMAX test and diagnosis, PrimeTime® static timing analysis, StarRC parasitic extraction, IC Validator physical verification and 3DIC Compiler, the industry's first next-generation chip packaging solution, aimed at enabling customers to combine or stack multiple dice on a single chip. Many of our EDA solutions are bolstered by AI and machine learning capabilities. In addition, we offer Synopsys.aiTM, the first product in the market that brings AI to the entire design process. This groundbreaking solution handles design complexity and takes over repetitive tasks such as design space exploration, verification coverage and regression analytics, as well as test program generation, while helping to optimize power, performance, and area. This frees up engineers to focus on chip quality and differentiation and enables them to quickly migrate their chip designs from foundry to foundry or from process node to process node.
Our Custom Design Family is a unified suite of design and verification tools that accelerates the transistor-level design of robust analog, mixed-signal, and custom-digital ICs. The platform features visually assisted layout automation, high-performance circuit simulation, reliability-aware verification, and natively integrated StarRC extraction and physical verification. This product family includes Custom Compiler layout and schematic editor, StarRC parasitic extraction, IC Validator physical verification and PrimeSim. The PrimeSim solution integrates PrimeSim SPICE, PrimeSim HSPICE, PrimeSim Pro and PrimeSim XA. The PrimeWave design environment is also included and provides comprehensive analysis and improved productivity and ease of use across all tools in PrimeSim.
Our Silicon Lifecycle Management (SLM) Family is a data analytics-driven platform that uses in-chip monitoring and sensing to optimize all phases of the silicon lifecycle-from design and manufacturing to in-field deployment and maintenance. The solution is integrated with the Digital Design Family for design calibration and analytics and includes Yield Explorer® for product ramp analytics, SiliconDash for test and production analytics, TestMAX ALE (adaptive learning engine) for intelligent data extraction and communication to the SLM database and DesignWare PVT IP for in-chip monitoring and sensing.
FPGA Design
FPGAs are complex chips that can be customized or programmed to perform a specific function after they are manufactured. For FPGA design, we offer Synplify® implementation software.
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Verification
Our Verification Family is built from our industry-leading verification technologies, providing virtual prototyping, static and formal verification, simulation, emulation, FPGA-based prototyping, and debug in a unified environment with verification IP, planning, and coverage technology. By providing consistent compile, runtime and debug environments across the flow of verification tasks and by enabling seamless transitions across functions, the platform helps our customers accelerate chip verification, bring up software earlier, and get to market sooner with advanced SoCs.
The individual products and solutions included in the Verification Family include the following:
•VC SpyGlass family of static verification technologies including lint, CDC (clock domain crossing), RDC (reset domain crossing), Constraint Checking, Synopsys TestMAX Advisor, and low-power analysis and verification;
•VCS® functional verification solution, our comprehensive RTL and gate-level simulation technology, including Fine-Grained Parallelism;
•Verdi® automated debug system, the industry's most comprehensive SoC debug;
•VC Formal, our next-generation formal verification product;
•ZeBu® emulation systems, which use high-performance hardware to emulate SoC designs so that designers can accelerate hardware, software and power verification of large complex SoCs and perform earlier verification and optimization of the SoC together with software;
•HAPS® FPGA-based prototyping systems, which are integrated and scalable hardware-software solutions for early software development and faster time to market;
•Virtualizer virtual prototyping solution, which addresses the increasing development challenges associated with software-rich semiconductor and electronic products by accelerating both the development and deployment of virtual prototypes; and
•Platform Architect solution, which provides for early analysis and optimization of multi-core SoC architectures for performance and power; and
•Other principal individual verification solutions, including the PrimeSim solution and the PrimeWave design environment.
Manufacturing
Our manufacturing solutions include Sentaurus technology computer-aided design device and process simulation products, Proteus mask synthesis tools, CATS® mask data preparation software, Yield Explorer® Odyssey, Yield-Manager® yield management solutions and QuantumATK atomic-scale modeling software.
We also provide consulting and design services that address all phases of the SoC development process, as well as a broad range of expert training and workshops on our latest tools and methodologies.
AI Driven EDA Stack
Our EDA software stack spanning design, verification, and manufacturing is augmented with AI and machine learning through our Synopsys.ai suite of complementary solutions. Starting in design with design space optimization that autonomously learns through quickly exploring potential design alternatives, enabling engineers to develop superior design outcomes with significantly reduced effort as well as learning-based design retargeting to derivative processes, improved test coverage through AI-driven models while reducing test vectors and tester time, and analysis of silicon performance and quality that is leveraged for optimizing next-generation revisions of design. The Synopsys.ai solutions include:
•DSO.ai - Design Space Optimization for best quality of results and productivity with scaling of exploration design workflows;
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•VSO.ai - Verification Space Optimization for improved functional verification coverage & faster turnaround time;
•TSO.ai - Test Space Optimization for reduced pattern count, turnaround time and higher coverage;
•ASO.ai - Analog Space Optimization for analog layout optimization & migration;
•Design.da - Design data analytics for actionable insights to unlock untapped power, performance, and area;
•Silicon.da - Silicon data analytics for root-cause analysis and part-level traceability of failures; and
•Fab.da - Manufacturing data analytics for improved process control, time-to-market, and user productivity.
Other
Our Other product group includes revenue from sales of products to university programs as well as our optical products, mechatronic simulation, and the impact of gains and losses from foreign currency hedges.
Design IP Segment
Our Design IP segment includes our Design IP products, which service companies primarily in the semiconductor and electronics industry.
Design IP Products
As more functionality converges into a single chip or even a multi-die system, the number of third-party IP blocks incorporated into designs is rapidly increasing. We provide the broadest, most comprehensive portfolio of high-quality, silicon-proven IP solutions for SoCs. Our broad Synopsys IP portfolio includes:
•High-quality solutions for widely used wired and wireless interfaces such as USB, PCI Express, DDR, Ethernet, MIPI, HDMI, and Bluetooth Low Energy;
•Logic libraries and embedded memories, including memory compilers, non-volatile memory, and standard cells with integrated test and repair;
•Processor solutions, including configurable ARC® processors, Neural Network processors, Digital Signal Processor cores, and software and application-specific instruction-set processor tools for embedded applications;
•Security IP solutions, including cryptographic cores and software, security subsystems, platform security and secured interface IP;
•An industry-leading IP offering for the automotive market, optimized for strict functional safety and reliability standards such as ISO 26262; and
•SoC infrastructure IP, datapath and building block IP, mathematical and floating-point components, Arm® AMBA® interconnect fabric and peripherals, and verification IP.
Our IP Accelerated initiative augments our established, broad portfolio of silicon-proven Synopsys IP with IP Prototyping Kits and customized IP subsystems to accelerate prototyping, software development, and integration of IP into SoCs.
We offer a broad portfolio of IP that has been optimized to address specific application requirements for the mobile, automotive, digital home, Internet of things, and cloud computing markets, enabling designers to quickly develop SoCs in these areas.
Software Integrity Segment
Our Software Integrity segment helps organizations align people, processes and technology to intelligently address software risks across their portfolio and at all stages of the application lifecycle. The testing tools, services, and programs enable our customers to manage open source license compliance and detect, prioritize, and remediate security vulnerabilities and defects across their entire software development lifecycle. Our offerings include security
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and quality testing products, managed services, programs and professional services, and training offered as on-premises and cloud-based delivery.
The Polaris Software Integrity Platform is designed to bring our products and services together into an integrated, easy-to-use solution that enables security and development teams to build secure, high-quality software faster.
Key offerings in this space include:
•Intelligent Orchestration solution, which enables DevOps to build a testing pipeline that enables a company to define-within its particular policy guidelines-the rules to determine which tests to run, including the Synopsys portfolio tests, third party products, or open source tests;
•Software Risk Manager, which correlates and prioritizes findings from the Synopsys portfolio, third party products, and open source tools, providing a comprehensive view of software security risk;
•Coverity® static analysis tools, which analyze software code to find crash-causing bugs, incorrect program behavior, the latest security vulnerabilities, memory leaks and other performance-degrading flaws;
•Black Duck software composition analysis tools, which scan binary and source code for license and compliance issues and other known security vulnerabilities stemming from incorporated third-party and open source code;
•WhiteHat® Dynamic, our latest dynamic application security testing solution, which rapidly and accurately finds vulnerabilities in websites and applications;
•Seeker® IAST tool, which identifies exploitable security vulnerabilities while web applications are running, thereby verifying results and eliminating false positives; and
•Defensics® fuzz testing tools, which examine security vulnerabilities in software binaries and libraries, particularly network protocols and file formats, by systematically sending invalid or unexpected inputs to the system under test.
Managed services allow developers to test code across many dimensions, and to rapidly respond to changing testing requirements and evolving threats. This includes mobile application security testing services to find vulnerabilities in mobile applications as well as dynamic application security testing services, which identify security vulnerabilities while web applications are running, without the need for source code.
Programs and professional services address unique security and quality needs with specialized consulting by skilled experts, including the Building Security in Maturity Mode, which measures the effectiveness of software security initiatives by assessing the current state as compared to industry benchmarks, and the Black Duck on demand audit services, which provides open source compliance and software vulnerability assessments as part of the due diligence process for mergers and acquisitions.
Finally, training includes eLearning and instructor-led training that prepares developers and security professionals to build security and quality into their software development process and remediate found vulnerabilities and defects.
Customer Service and Technical Support
A high level of customer service and support is critical to the adoption and successful use of our products. We provide technical support for our products through application engineering teams.
Post-contract customer support includes providing frequent updates to maintain the utilization of the software due to rapid changes in technology. In our Design Automation and Design IP segments, post-contract customer support for our EDA and IP products also includes access to the SolvNet® Plus portal, where customers can explore our complete design knowledge database, get self-help and get support. Updated regularly, the SolvNet Plus portal includes technical documentation, design tips and answers to user questions. Customers can also engage, for additional charges, with our worldwide network of applications consultants for additional support needs.
In our Software Integrity segment, post-contract customer support for our products includes access to our support community portal, where customers can access our product documentation, self-service training materials, customer forums and our product knowledge base. Customers can also raise support tickets, request replacement license keys and validate the terms of their active license keys through the portal. Our support community portal is
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frequently updated with new and supplemental materials on a variety of topics. Customers may engage dedicated support engineers for an additional charge.
In addition, we offer training workshops designed to increase customer design proficiency and productivity with our products. Workshops cover our EDA products and methodologies used in our design and verification flows, as well as specialized modules addressing systems design, logic design, physical design, simulation and testing. We offer regularly scheduled public and private courses in a variety of locations worldwide, as well as online training (live or on-demand) through our Virtual Classrooms.
Product Warranties
We generally warrant our products to be free from defects in media and to substantially conform to material specifications for a period of 90 days for our software products and for up to six months for our hardware products. In certain cases, we also provide our customers with limited indemnification with respect to claims that their use of our software products infringes on patents, copyrights, trademarks or trade secrets. We have not experienced material warranty or indemnity claims to date.
Support for Industry Standards
We actively create and support standards that help our EDA and IP customers increase productivity, facilitate efficient design flows, improve interoperability of tools from different vendors and ensure connectivity, functionality and interoperability of IP building blocks. Standards in the electronic design industry can be established by formal accredited organizations, industry consortia, company licensing made available to all, de facto usage, or through open source licensing.
In our Design Automation segment, our EDA products support many standards, including the most commonly used hardware description languages: SystemVerilog, Verilog, VHDL and SystemC. Our products utilize numerous industry-standard data formats, APIs and databases for the exchange of design data among our tools, other EDA vendors' products and applications that customers develop internally.
In our Design IP segment, we comply with a wide range of industry standards within our IP product family to ensure usability and interconnectivity.
In our Software Integrity segment, our solutions support several existing and emerging industry standards for software coding and security, such as the Motor Industry Software Reliability Association coding standards for the automotive industry. In addition, our products support multiple major programming languages, including C/C++, Objective C, C#, JavaScript (including many commonly used frameworks), and others. In addition, we support many common compilers, development environments, frameworks, and data and file formats.
Sales and Distribution
Our Design Automation and Design IP segment customers are primarily semiconductor and electronics systems companies. The customers for products in our Software Integrity segment include many of these companies as well as companies from a wider array of industries, including electronics, financial services, automotive, medicine, energy and industrials.
We market our products and services principally through direct sales in the United States and our principal foreign markets. Our Software Integrity segment continues to grow its indirect sales partner program, enabling our Software Integrity segment to engage geographies beyond the reach of our direct sales force and opening opportunities in targeted vertical markets. We typically distribute our software products and documentation to customers electronically, but provide physical media (e.g., DVD-ROMs) when requested by the customer.
We maintain sales and support centers throughout the United States. Outside the United States, we maintain sales, support or service offices in Canada, multiple countries in Europe, Israel and throughout Asia, including Japan, China, Korea, India and Taiwan. Our offices are further described under Part I, Item 2, Properties of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Information relating to domestic and foreign operations, including revenue and long-lived assets by geographic area, is contained in Part II, Item 8, Financial Statements and Supplementary Data of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Risks related to our foreign operations are described in Part I, Item 1A, Risk Factors of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
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Revenue Attributable to Product Groups
Revenue from our products and services is categorized into four groups:
•EDA, which includes digital and custom IC design software, verification hardware and software products, manufacturing-related design products, FPGA design software, AI driven EDA solutions, and professional services;
•Design IP, which includes our Synopsys IP portfolio;
•Software Integrity, which includes solutions that test software code for security vulnerabilities and quality defects, as well as professional and managed services; and
•Other, which includes university programs, optical products, mechatronic simulation, and the impact of gains and losses from foreign currency hedges.
Revenue attributable to each of our four product groups is shown below as a percentage of our total revenue for those fiscal years.
Aggregate revenue derived from one of our customers and its subsidiaries through multiple agreements accounted for 12.4%, 11.7% and 10.6% of our total revenue in fiscal 2023, 2022 and 2021, respectively.
Product Sales and Licensing Agreements
We typically license our software to customers under non-exclusive license agreements that restrict use of our software to specified purposes within specified geographical areas. The majority of licenses to our EDA products are network licenses that allow a number of individual users to access the software on a defined network, including, in some cases, regional or global networks. The majority of licenses to our Software Integrity products are capacity or user licenses that allow a number of users to access the software based on a specified number of team members or specified code-bases in a defined territory. License fees depend on the type of license, product mix, and number of copies of each product licensed.
For a full discussion of our software product offerings, see Part II, Item 7, Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
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We typically license Synopsys IP products under nonexclusive license agreements that provide usage rights for specific designs. Fees under these licenses are typically charged on a per design basis plus, in some cases, royalties. See Note 2. Significant Accounting Policies and Bases of Presentation of the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements for further information.
Our hardware products, which principally consist of our prototyping and emulation systems, are either sold or leased to our customers. Risks related to disruptions in our supply chain affecting our business are described in Part I, Item 1A, Risk Factors of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Our professional services team typically provides design consulting services to our customers under consulting agreements with statements of work specific to each project.
Competition
Within our Design Automation segment, we compete against other EDA vendors and against our customers' own design tools and internal design capabilities. The EDA industry is highly competitive. In general, we compete principally on technology leadership, product quality and features (including ease-of-use), license terms, price and payment terms, post-contract customer support, flexibility of tool use, and interoperability with our own and other vendors' products. We also deliver a significant amount of engineering and design consulting for our products. No single factor drives an EDA customer's buying decision, and we compete on all fronts to capture a higher portion of our customers' budgets. Our competitors include EDA vendors that offer varying ranges of products and services, such as Cadence Design Systems, Inc. and Siemens EDA. We also compete with other EDA vendors, including new entrants to the marketplace, that offer products focused on one or more discrete phases of the IC design process, as well as with customers' internally developed design tools and capabilities.
Within our Design IP segment, Synopsys competes against numerous other IP providers, including Cadence Design Systems, Inc., and our customers' internally developed IP. We generally compete on the basis of product quality, reliability, features, availability of titles for new manufacturing processes, ease of integration with customer designs, compatibility with design tools, license terms, price and payment terms, and customer support.
Our Software Integrity segment competes with numerous solution providers, many of which focus on specific aspects of software security or quality analysis. We also compete with frequent new entrants, which include start-up companies and more established software companies. For example, competitors named in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing include Checkmarx Ltd., Veracode, Inc., Open Text Corporation, GitHub, Inc. and Snyk Ltd.
Risks related to competitive factors affecting our business are described in Part I, Item 1A, Risk Factors of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Proprietary Rights
We primarily rely upon a combination of copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secret laws and license and non-disclosure agreements to establish and protect our proprietary rights. We have a diversified portfolio of more than 3,300 United States and foreign patents issued, and we will continue to pursue additional patents in the future. Our issued patents have expiration dates through 2044 and generally have a term of twenty years from filing. Our patents primarily relate to our products and the technology used in connection with our products. Our source code is protected both as a trade secret and as an unpublished copyrighted work. However, third parties may independently develop similar technology. In addition, effective copyright and trade secret protection may be unavailable or limited in some foreign countries. While protecting our proprietary technology is important to our success, our business as a whole is not significantly dependent upon any single patent, copyright, trademark, or license.
In many cases, under our customer agreements and other license agreements, we offer to indemnify our customers if the licensed products infringe on a third party's intellectual property rights. As a result, we may from time to time need to defend claims that our customers' use of our products infringes on these third-party rights. We license software and other intellectual property from third parties, including, in several instances, for inclusion in our products. Risks related to our use of third-party technology are described in Part I, Item 1A, Risk Factors of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Environment, Social and Governance Matters
At Synopsys, our Smart Future Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) strategy provides a framework for how we manage our own operational impact on the world and our ability to influence others to do the same, as we
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believe this approach supports the success of the business. We leverage our strategy and our corporate governance processes to assess and manage the ESG matters that are relevant to our business as part of our efforts to operate in a sustainable manner.
We aim to influence positive social and environmental change across our ecosystem by applying our resources, competencies, and team-based problem-solving approach. Our technology is in action in countless ways, from bringing safety and security to the driverless car revolution to enabling the technologies that are an increasingly vital component of protecting human health and well-being.
The Corporate Governance and Nominating Committee of our Board of Directors is responsible for overseeing policies; practices; priority and risk assessments; risk management initiatives, goals and progress toward goals; and public disclosures relating to ESG matters, except to the extent delegated to other committees of our Board of Directors, such as matters related to human capital management and diversity, equity and inclusion.
Additional information about our approach to our ESG priorities is available on our ESG website, including our Environmental Policy and our ESG Report. The contents of our website and ESG Report are referenced for general information only and are not incorporated into this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Human Capital Resources
At Synopsys, we are committed to empowering our employees to pursue their passion, challenge themselves and their peers, and make their mark on the world. We believe this creates value for us, our stockholders, and the lives of the people we impact every day. Our commitment to attracting, developing and retaining top talent makes this goal possible and our constant pursuit of improving our employees' experience promotes a culture where employees can thrive in their career. As of our fiscal 2023 year-end, Synopsys had approximately 20,300 employees, with approximately 24% in the United States and 76% in other locations around the world. Approximately 80% of our employees are engineers, and over half of those employees hold Masters' or PhD degrees. The human capital measures and objectives that we focus on include recruitment and retention; diversity, equity and inclusion; total rewards; employee health, safety, and wellbeing; employee engagement and development; and succession planning.
Risks related to our human capital are described in Part I, Item 1A, Risk Factors of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Recruitment and Retention
Our workforce is representative of the industry we serve. In fiscal 2023, we increased our employee headcount by approximately 7%, with a continued focus on promoting gender diversity with respect to those in technical and senior level positions and ensuring a vibrant talent pipeline with early career hiring and investment in training and development. As of our fiscal 2023 year-end, our undesired turnover rate was 2.7%.1 We attribute the strong retention of our talented workforce to a number of factors, including exciting and challenging assignments; growth opportunities; strong leadership and management; a culture of integrity; our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion; competitive and equitable compensation and benefits; our leading products and technology; and the strength of our customer relationships.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
We seek to integrate diversity, equity and inclusion into our corporate values at every level-from our foundation of integrity to our execution excellence and from our dedicated leadership to our united passion for a better tomorrow. We strive to maintain a culture that values different perspectives and backgrounds, where everyone is treated with respect for who they are, and where people feel a sense of belonging. We believe this is not only essential for our success as a global leader in innovation, but also for the success of our employees in their own careers. We value the diversity of our teams, talent pipelines and pay and development programs, with a goal to ensure inclusive, equitable practices. We carefully study retention trends and feedback from diverse groups to identify areas where we can improve.
1 We calculate undesired turnover rate by dividing the number of undesired exits from Synopsys by the average headcount for fiscal 2023, and we define undesired turnover as exits by high-performing employees who resigned from Synopsys (or its subsidiaries) to pursue other work opportunities. Undesired turnover does not include employees with low performance, mutual resignations, or resignations due to personal reasons (e.g., retirement or returning to school).
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As of our fiscal 2023 year-end:
•Women comprised 25.4% of our global workforce;
•Women in senior level positions comprised 13.1% of all senior level positions at the company; and
•U.S. Black, Latinx, and Indigenous persons comprised 5.8% of our U.S. workforce.
We provide training designed to encourage equitable and inclusive behavior to attract, retain and develop our workforce. In addition, our Employee Resource Groups, which are vital to our Synopsys community, host events and implement actions to attract and engage diverse talent and foster an inclusive workplace.
In fiscal 2023, we included workforce metrics such as diversity, employee retention and employee engagement as incentive plan goals for our executive officers to advance key diversity and human capital initiatives. We believe these initiatives help to ensure that we continue to seek out strong, diverse, qualified candidates, and that we develop and retain key talent.
Total Rewards
Our Total Rewards are designed to offer meaningful benefits and compensation for the time, energy, commitment, skills, and expertise employees bring to the company every day. We have practices in place that are intended to deliver fair and equitable compensation for employees based on their contribution and performance. We benchmark market practices and regularly review our compensation and benefits against the market to help ensure that it is competitive. We also offer a comprehensive set of benefits for employees and their families, focused on physical, mental and financial health and wellbeing. Our compensation and benefit programs are tailored to the various geographies in which we operate, and for eligible employees may include:
•Market-competitive salary and cash bonus opportunity;
•Employee Stock Purchase Plan;
•Equity compensation;
•Robust medical, dental, vision, and wellness benefits;
•Comprehensive leave plans;
•Life insurance options;
•Retirement plans and associated benefits;
•Financial planning tools and employee assistance plans;
•Student loan repayment assistance;
•Cancer-specific prevention, early detection, treatment and support programs; and
•Parental resources and adoption benefits.
Health, Safety and Wellbeing
Our commitment to health, safety, and wellness was underscored this year by the support and resources we offered to help employees thrive in a hybrid work environment while balancing their personal lives. Through our Stronger Through Wellbeing campaign, our leaders and managers are encouraged to model the importance of health and wellbeing, and many create opportunities to engage in wellness-related activities as a team. We also offer a variety of programs and resources at no cost to employees and their family members to support their mental, emotional, and financial wellbeing.
Employee Engagement
We have a comprehensive employee feedback program, and we use the feedback to gain an understanding of the employee experience and to make improvements in a variety of areas-from how we interact with customers to how we share best practices, and more. Through our semi-annual SHAPE Synopsys surveys, we obtain employee insight into our values, manager effectiveness, ability to innovate, perceptions on diversity, inclusion and belonging,
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and other critical factors. We also use the surveys to create space for important conversations about who we are, where we are going, and how we can connect with each other and our work.
Approximately 94% of our employees participated in our SHAPE survey in May 2023. We received an engagement score of 82, which is calculated by computing the average score set to a 100-point scale, for all employee responses to the questions pertaining to employee satisfaction and job satisfaction. These results demonstrate Synopsys' stability, resiliency, and a global workforce that is highly engaged. We saw strong scores from our employees regarding their connection to our culture, their personal investment in Synopsys' strategies and objectives, and their team's ability to innovate. As we grow, we aspire to maintain our results-oriented culture by balancing productivity with smart investments in our employees' development, while also supporting individual wellbeing-two key drivers of the overall employee experience.
We believe ongoing performance feedback encourages greater engagement in our business and improved individual performance. Each year, our employees participate in our performance development process that summarizes key accomplishments for the preceding year, establishes new stretch goals, and identifies critical capabilities for development. As part of this process, we encourage managers to solicit and share supportive multi-rater feedback, further strengthening the focus on teamwork and team success.
Talent Development and Succession Planning
We offer several programs to support the career advancement of our employees. Through our digital learning platform, we foster and support an "always learning" culture where employees can access training, external articles, videos, and blogs. In addition, we host a series of in-person and on-demand learning sessions designed to build capability and adaptability required for the future. As employees advance in their careers, our training framework is intended to build new capabilities on established foundational skills.
Based upon the belief that our employees deserve great managers, our management training is designed to increase capability in the areas of communication, engagement, coaching, diversity, equity, and inclusion, hiring and on-boarding, and business skills and help promote an ethical and supportive work environment free from bias and harassment. In fiscal 2023, we introduced a new leadership training, and focused on helping our many managers thrive in connecting team work to company priorities while giving them the tools to be great coaches and leaders. In addition, our regions and business teams customize development programs for their specific needs.
Information about our Executive Officers
The executive officers of Synopsys and their ages as of December 12, 2023 were as follows:
NameAgePosition
Aart J. de Geus69Chief Executive Officer and Chair of the Board of Directors
Sassine Ghazi53President and Chief Operating Officer
Shelagh Glaser59Chief Financial Officer
Richard Mahoney61Chief Revenue Officer
John F. Runkel, Jr.68General Counsel and Corporate Secretary
Aart J. de Geus co-founded Synopsys and has served as Chair of our Board of Directors since February 1998 and Chief Executive Officer since January 1994. He served as Co-Chief Executive Officer with Dr. Chi-Foon Chan from May 2012 until April 2022. Effective January 1, 2024, Dr. de Geus will transition into the role of Executive Chair of our Board of Directors. Since the inception of Synopsys in December 1986, Dr. de Geus has held a variety of positions, including President, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Senior Vice President of Marketing. He has served as a member of our Board of Directors since 1986, and as Chair of our Board of Directors from 1986 to 1992 and again from 1998 until his upcoming transition to Executive Chair on January 1, 2024. Dr. de Geus has also served on the board of directors of Applied Materials, Inc. since July 2007. Dr. de Geus holds an M.S.E.E. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Southern Methodist University.
Sassine Ghazi has served as our Chief Operating Officer since August 2020, became our President in November 2021 and joined our Board of Directors in August 2023. Effective January 1, 2024, Mr. Ghazi will assume the role of President and Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Ghazi joined Synopsys in March 1998 as an Application Engineer and served as General Manager of the Design Group. Prior to joining Synopsys, Mr. Ghazi was a design engineer at Intel Corporation. Mr. Ghazi received his bachelor's degree in Business Administration from Lebanese American
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University; a B.S.E.E from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1993; and an M.S.E.E. from the University of Tennessee in 1995.
Shelagh Glaser has served as our Chief Financial Officer since December 2022. Prior to joining Synopsys, Ms. Glaser served as Chief Financial Officer of Zendesk, Inc. from May 2021 to November 2022. Ms. Glaser previously served in senior finance roles at Intel Corporation, a multinational technology company, including serving as its Corporate Vice President and Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer for its Data Platform Group from July 2019 to May 2021 and serving as its Corporate Vice President and Chief Financial Officer and in various other senior roles in its Client Computing Group from December 2013 to July 2019. Ms. Glaser has served as a director and member of the Audit Committee at PubMatic, Inc. since June 2022. Ms. Glaser holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Michigan and an M.B.A. in Finance from Carnegie Mellon University.
Richard Mahoney has served as our Chief Revenue Officer since November 2022. Mr. Mahoney joined Synopsys as a Special Projects Advisor in May 2022. Prior to joining Synopsys, Mr. Mahoney held several senior management positions with Ansys, Inc. from 2016 to 2022, including most recently as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales, Marketing and Customer Excellence from December 2016 to May 2022. Prior to joining Ansys, from 2014 to 2016, Mr. Mahoney was Senior Vice President, Design Enablement and International Sales, at Global Foundries, a semiconductor manufacturing company. Mr. Mahoney holds an A.S. in Computer Science from the Maxwell Institute of Technology.
John F. Runkel, Jr. has served as our General Counsel and Corporate Secretary since May 2014. From October 2008 to March 2013, he was Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary of Affymetrix, Inc. He served as Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of Intuitive Surgical, Inc. from 2006 to 2007. Mr. Runkel served in several roles at VISX, Inc. from 2001 to 2005, most recently as Senior Vice President of Business Development and General Counsel. Mr. Runkel was also a partner at the law firm of Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP for 11 years. Mr. Runkel holds a Bachelor of Arts and a Juris Doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles.
There are no family relationships among any Synopsys executive officers or directors.