Anirudh Devgan
President & Chief Executive Officer at Cadence Design Systems
Thank you, Richard. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today.
Cadence delivered excellent financial results for the second quarter of 2023, with strong ongoing customer demand for our innovative technology. We exceeded our guidance on all key metrics and are raising our financial outlook for the year yet again, resulting in 14% year-over-year revenue growth and 19% non-GAAP EPS growth. John will provide more details shortly on both our Q2 results and the updated outlook for the year. With its unparalleled promise, generative AI is beginning to make a significant impact globally.
Our dedicated focus on AI over the past several years, combined with our computational software expertise and invaluable data that lies at the core of AI, it uniquely positions us to deliver to this tremendous potential of this transformational technology. With escalating design complexity, increasing design starts and a growing talent shortage, AI-driven design automation is crucial in empowering customers to fully realize their innovation potential. Our customers are increasingly adopting our chip, package, board, system, generative AI portfolio as they are achieving exceptional quality of results and productivity benefit with these solutions.
Customers are ramping up their R&D spend in AI-driven automation, opening up significant opportunities for Cadence. Our solutions are enabling marquee AI infrastructure platform companies to deliver their next-generation compute, networking and memory products. For instance, in its Computex keynote earlier this quarter, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA noted that NVIDIA is a big Cadence customer and commented on the expanding strategic partnership between NVIDIA and Cadence to accelerate EDA, system analysis, AI and digital biology.
Cadence has successfully collaborated with Tesla on the development of their game-changing Dojo AI supercomputer. Tesla utilized a broad array of Cadence solutions across digital, custom analog, verification, 2.5D and 3D-IC and system analysis for developing Dojo chips and solutions. We are very excited to extend our partnership to Tesla's next-generation Dojo and SSD platforms. Our customers like Tesla are able to leverage the power of revolutionary Cadence Cerebrus generative AI technology to optimize the quality of results of their groundbreaking AI chips and related solutions. And from a product perspective, we began by providing AI-driven solutions for core EDA applications and expanded our AI portfolio to include system design and analysis and plan to extend it to life sciences in the future.
With AI as they're underpinning, other generational trends such as hyperscale computing, 5G and autonomous driving, continue to spur robust design activity across semi and system companies, creating ample market opportunities for our differentiated technology portfolio. Now let's talk about our key highlights for Q2. In Q2, we deepened our long-standing partnership with a marquee electronic system company through a broad-ranging expansion of our core EDA, hardware, IP and systems portfolio. Emulation and prototyping have become a must-have part of the chip tapeout and software Behringer Flows and secular demand for our hardware platforms drove our verification business in Q2 to a 27% year-over-year revenue growth.
Following a record 2022 and Q1 '23, our Palladium Z2 and Protium X2 hardware platforms delivered a record Q2 as market demand accelerated for these best-in-class solutions. With 14 new customers and 45 repeat customers more than half the orders during the quarter included both platforms. Demand for our hardware solutions was broad-based with particular strength seen in AI, hyperscale computing and automotive segments. A global communication services leader successfully deployed the Z2 and X2 systems to significantly accelerate the development of their data center chips for internal use, including those designed for AI applications.
Our hardware platform enabled them to accelerate their verification workload and software bring up enabling first-pass silicon and software success. Verisium, our AI-driven verification platform that's built upon the JedAI database and natively integrated with our verification engines, is gaining traction at market-shaping customers. For instance, a large mobile chip company is working with us on developing a new Verisium regression optimization app and a Japanese semi customer is actively deploying Verisium apps across its automotive SoC and already saw a 4x improvement in the identification of erroneous source code check-ins.
Our digital IC business had another solid quarter, with 15% year-over-year revenue growth, largely driven by proliferation of our digital full flow, especially at the most advanced node and market-shaping customers. Our Cadence Cerebrus solution leverages breakthrough AI-driven technology to explore the entire design space and automatically optimize the digital full flow to deliver transformational results. Adoption and proliferation of Cadence Cerebrus accelerated. And with multiple new marquee wins is now deployed at 8 of our top 10 customers. A leading hyperscaler doubled their run rate through a major expansion that included our digital full flow and Cadence Cerebrus.
Another market shaping hyperscaler successfully used our digital full flow and Cadence Cerebrus to achieve a 16% leakage power reduction on their latest custom silicon. And Socionext achieved 2 to 3x better productivity with our new Joules RTL design studio through analysis efficiency and significantly reduced iteration between RTL and implementation. On IP, our scalable and profitable growth strategy continues benefiting from ongoing outsourcing trend as well as the opportunities offered by expanding foundry ecosystem. Demand for our design IP was strong, led by our multiyear agreement with Samsung Foundry to expand the availability of our design IP portfolio for Samsung's advanced process technology.
We signed a definitive agreement with Rambus to acquire their 5 IP assets along with the talented team. The addition of the leading HBM GDDR5 solutions and SerDes IP enhances our established IP portfolio, providing complete subsystem solutions for demanding networking, hyperscaler and AI applications. Our system design and analysis business continued its strong momentum in Q2, delivering 23% year-over-year revenue growth. With Moore's Law slowing down and chip complexity and cost increasing, companies are looking to multi-die 3D-IC and chiplet-based architecture to achieve better performance and greater cost savings.
In Q2, we expanded our collaboration with Samsung Foundry through the delivery of reference flows and package design kits based on our uniquely differentiated integrity 3D-IC platform, the industry's only unified platform that includes system planning, packaging and system-level analysis in a single cockpit. Our multiphysics solutions boosted by our optimality generative AI technology, leverage differentiated system simulation and optimization techniques to deliver superior results. Our CFD portfolio that includes recently acquired high fidelity simulation technology, one large renewals and add-on business with top aerospace and defense companies. We were pleased with the new wins and growing repeat orders for our multiphysics portfolio from customers across multiple end markets.
In summary, I'm pleased with our Q2 results and the continuing momentum of our business. AI-driven automation and chip and system design offers massive opportunities for Cadence over the long term that seamlessly aligned with our computational software core competence and intelligent system design strategy. We continue to invest in our world-class EDA system design and analysis and AI capabilities to deliver cutting-edge innovation to our customers and partners.
Now I will turn it over to John to provide more details on the Q2 results and our updated 2023 outlook.