Empyrean Brand Guidelines: Beijing’s Huada Jiutian, ChiNext & Chip Design Software

A Beijing company built to make chip-design software at home.

Empyrean is the English trading name of Beijing Huada Jiutian Technology (华大九天), a maker of electronic design automation, or EDA, software: the programs engineers use to draw, simulate and check integrated circuits before they are made. English and Chinese Wikipedia give its founding date as 26 May 2009, in Beijing, and its founder as Liu Weiping, who had worked on Panda, which English Wikipedia, citing the Securities Times in 2021, describes as China’s first domestic EDA tool. In a 2018 release it used the English name Huada Empyrean Software.

From the start the company was backed by state investors. English Wikipedia names China Electronics Corporation (CEC), the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund and Shenzhen Capital Group among its funders, and describes the company as partially state-owned.

Its home market has long been dominated by foreign suppliers. In June 2021 KrASIA, adapting a report by 36Kr, cited data from the China Center for Information Industry Development, a think tank under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, putting Empyrean’s share of the Chinese EDA market at 6 percent in 2020, against around 80 percent for the three leading foreign groups together. The same article described Empyrean’s aim of covering the whole EDA chain, from design to wafer manufacturing.

Analog design, simulation and flat-panel displays.

Empyrean’s documented work is strongest in analog and full-custom design, the hand-crafted side of chip design where circuits are drawn transistor by transistor. In October 2018 the company announced that RICOH Electronic Devices, the Japanese maker of power-management chips, had adopted its analog and mixed-signal front-end platform as its main design flow. That platform combined a schematic editor, Aether SE; a SPICE circuit simulator, ALPS; and a mixed-signal design environment. In the same release Empyrean described itself as a provider of EDA software and IP for both integrated circuits and flat-panel displays, a second market in which display makers use similar layout and verification tools.

TrendForce, summarising the company’s website in July 2025, listed its core offerings as a full-custom design EDA platform, EDA tools for wafer manufacturing, and related software and technical services. English Wikipedia reports that in 2023 the company said its analog tools could partially support a 5 nm process and its digital tools could fully support 7 nm; those are the company’s statements.

Its range has gaps that analysts have pointed out. English Wikipedia cites the broker Guosen Securities as naming three limitations: incomplete support for the full digital chip-design flow, limited support for advanced processes, and limited ability in EDA for manufacturing and testing. In June 2021 KrASIA described the company’s goal as becoming the first Chinese EDA business to cover the full chain that the large foreign groups already serve.

The company tried to widen that range by acquisition. On 30 March 2025, Yicai reported, Empyrean released a proposal to buy all of Xpeedic, a Shanghai EDA company working on chip, packaging and system simulation, through a mix of shares and cash. Empyrean said acquisitions were a key part of its growth strategy and that Xpeedic would fill gaps in fields such as analog RF chips, power devices and memory chips. Xpeedic, founded in 2019, had completed preparatory counselling for its own listing on Shanghai’s STAR Market a month before the announcement, Digitimes Asia reported. On 9 July 2025, TrendForce reported, citing ITHome, Empyrean said it would not proceed, after the two sides failed to agree on key terms.

Design and documentation.

Chip-design software and semiconductor IP are hard things to picture. The products are programs, licences and blocks of circuitry that customers place inside their own chips, so the companies that sell them have to borrow images from the work itself. The most common is the chip floor-plan: a die seen from above, its functional blocks lit in bright colour, or the stacked metal routing layers of a layout drawn as glowing lines on a dark ground.

Abstract circuit lines do much of the remaining work. Thin traces, right-angled paths and grids of contact points stand in for a product that no one can hold, and they travel easily from a website banner to a trade-show wall. Alongside them come pictures of people at work: engineers in front of multi-monitor layouts, waveforms and schematics on the screens, the design shown in progress rather than finished.

The trade has its own stages. The Design Automation Conference is where, according to English Wikipedia, Mentor Graphics introduced its first product in 1982, and booths there and at the RISC-V Summit carry the same chip renders, circuit patterns and demonstration screens. Keynote stages follow a familiar pattern too: a chief executive in front of a roadmap slide, with process nodes, product generations and partner names set out across the screen.

This guide looks past those shared images to what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it now, which tools or IP it is known for, and which events in its history — mergers, takeovers, export-control cases — shaped the name it trades under. Where a claim rests only on a company’s own word, we say so.

A ChiNext listing, an export-control listing and state control.

Empyrean went public on the ChiNext board of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. Its application was accepted in June 2021, KrASIA reported, and English Wikipedia dates the listing to July 2022; Yicai in 2025 confirmed that the shares trade on ChiNext. Wikipedia says the proceeds were earmarked for EDA development projects, including analog and digital design and verification tools.

On 2 December 2024 the United States Department of Commerce added Empyrean to its Entity List, one of 140 Chinese groups named in that round, Tom’s Hardware reported; the listing restricts exports of US technology to the companies named. Empyrean said the impact would be controllable. About a week later, TrendForce reported, citing the South China Morning Post, the board authorised CEC, which already held an indirect stake of about 34 percent, to take full control: four directors resigned, CEC took six of the eleven board seats, and the company was to become a directly consolidated subsidiary, without any change in shareholdings.

US policy in 2025 touched the company’s market too. In late May 2025 the US government reportedly told the three largest foreign EDA suppliers to stop selling software to China without a licence, and on 3 July it eased those requirements, TrendForce reported, citing Bloomberg. English Wikipedia reports that in June 2025 Empyrean said it saw opportunities in the curbs.

The company remains based in Beijing, in Chaoyang District, according to Chinese Wikipedia. Its products are software and services rather than physical goods.

For a design guide, Empyrean shows a technical brand shaped as much by national industrial policy as by its products. Compare Synopsys and Cadence, two of the foreign EDA groups its home market long relied on. For this guide we use a night indigo, a pale mist and an old gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Empyrean’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.