Xingji secures investment from domestic EDA leader Empyrean to deepen industrial chain collaboration | Yunqi Capital
Doubling Down on Digital EDA Or: **Doubling Down on Digital EDA** Or if it's a headline/fragment about a company's strategy: **Doubling Down on Digital EDA**
EDA is known as the "mother of chips" — the foundational toolkit for integrated circuit design. Within the EDA chain, "place and route" represents the highest technical barrier and longest R&D cycle. Xingji's core product, AmazeSys, is China's first fully self-developed digital place-and-route tool. It has been validated by leading domestic IC design houses and is deeply integrated with major domestic foundries.
Recently, Xingji brought in Empyrean Technology, China's EDA leader, as a strategic shareholder. Yunqi Capital was an investor in Xingji's Series A round. In this edition of Yunqi Partners, we share the company's latest developments.
The following is adapted from SINA Corporation, EE Times China, and other sources.
Recently, domestic EDA leader Empyrean Technology announced a RMB 149 million investment in Xingji, an early Yunqi Capital portfolio company, acquiring a 6.90% stake. Xingji has brought in Empyrean Technology as a strategic shareholder. Place and route is the most technically demanding and longest-cycle segment in the digital circuit EDA chain — Empyrean Technology described it in its announcement as "the bridge connecting logical design to physical implementation." In analog, memory, and RF segments, domestic EDA vendors have already achieved full-flow coverage; digital circuit EDA, the largest and longest chain, represents the next frontier for the industry.
Founded in October 2020, Xingji focuses on digital implementation EDA solutions (electronic design automation). The company's core product is AmazeSys, China's first fully self-developed digital place-and-route tool. EDA is known as the "mother of chips," the foundational toolkit for integrated circuit design. In the full digital circuit design flow, place and route (Place & Route) carries high technical barriers and long development cycles, and has long been dominated by international giants. Whether self-sufficiency can be achieved in this segment directly impacts the completeness and security of China's domestic EDA toolchain.
AmazeSys is China's first fully self-developed product built from the ground up. Around AmazeSys, Xingji has built out a complete product matrix:
- AmazeFP: Intelligent floorplanning
- AmazeME-FP / AmazeME-Place: Machine learning-optimized floorplanning and placement
- AmazeECO: One-stop engineering change order optimization and repair
- AmazeDRCLite: Fast DRC & DFM convergence
This toolkit has been validated by leading domestic IC design houses and is deeply integrated with major domestic foundries. In 2023, the company received the "China IC Design Achievement Award · EDA Technology Breakthrough of the Year" from AspenCore.
Empyrean Technology and Xingji both ranked on the ASPENCORE China Fabless 100 Top 10 EDA Companies list (2026 edition)
As China's leading EDA company, Empyrean Technology has been steadily building out its digital circuit design full-flow capabilities in recent years. This strategic investment in Xingji gives it a foothold in the place-and-route segment — on one hand, leveraging an external team's technical accumulation and R&D experience in this domain to accelerate the process of filling critical toolchain gaps; on the other, the equity partnership helps foster tighter collaboration on technical synergy and product integration, reducing in-house development timelines and uncertainty.
From an industry perspective, completing the domestic EDA toolchain is a systematic undertaking. Beyond single-point breakthroughs, end-to-end flow capability is increasingly becoming the key metric of competitive strength. For Xingji, bringing in Empyrean Technology as a strategic shareholder means deeper integration with a leading full-flow vendor's toolchain, along with expanded opportunities for foundry-side collaboration.
