To fully appreciate the significance of the Synopsys–Ansys union, it is helpful to revisit an earlier milestone from 2017, when Synopsys quietly but strategically expanded its modeling portfolio by acquiring the Danish company QuantumWise. Known for its flagship software Atomistix ToolKit (ATK) and its intuitive interface Virtual NanoLab, QuantumWise had become a respected name in first-principles modeling, particularly in simulations involving density functional theory (DFT), nonequilibrium Green’s function (NEGF) transport, and nano-device design.

I still vividly remember the excitement of working with ATK for the first time back in 2015. At the time, it was a game changer for me. It marked the beginning of my more serious involvement with DFT calculations on periodic systems. I had Atomistix ToolKit running on an AMD FX‑8370 CPU with just 8 GB of RAM. Despite the modest hardware, I was able to perform DFT calculations on smaller unit cells, up to around 40 atoms, quite efficiently using smaller basis sets.

Years later, in 2022, I had the opportunity to work with QuantumATK, the evolved successor of ATK, on a Ryzen 3700X system with 32 GB of RAM. That too was a very smooth and enjoyable experience. Interestingly, my introduction to DFTB calculations also came through Atomistix ToolKit, and it quickly became a regular part of our computational workflow. Our first publication using ATK was in 2016 (DOI: 10.1016/j.jpcs.2016.07.006), and since then, we have published several more papers featuring simulations carried out using QuantumATK.

There’s also a noteworthy piece of history surrounding QuantumWise. Its founder and lead developer, Kurt Stokbro, later became the CEO and early investor of Sparrow Quantum, a photonic quantum technology spin-out from the Niels Bohr Institute, founded by Prof. Peter Lodahl. Today, Sparrow Quantum is recognized as a pioneer in deterministic single-photon technology, aiming to revolutionize the field of distributed quantum computing.

As reported in Synopsys’s official communication in 2017, the QuantumWise acquisition was part of a broader strategy to advance Design Technology Co-Optimization (DTCO), a methodology that tightly integrates process technology and design optimization across all levels of the semiconductor stack. The integration of QuantumWise’s atomistic simulation tools gave Synopsys the ability to model materials and device behavior at the quantum mechanical level, a critical scale as transistor dimensions continue to shrink and quantum effects become dominant in next-generation devices.

Synopsys noted at the time that QuantumWise’s technology delivered “critical insight into how atomic-level structures influence device behavior,” and the deal was expected to enhance “early-stage process and device research for next-generation memory and logic technologies.” The acquisition was well-received in the modeling community, largely due to QuantumWise’s reputation for balancing computational power with user accessibility through its visual interface.

Contemporaneous financial and tech media reports highlighted that the acquisition strengthened Synopsys’s position in an increasingly competitive simulation landscape, adding cutting-edge capabilities in the simulation of nanoscale materials and devices—a rapidly growing need in semiconductor research and materials innovation.

Following the acquisition, the ATK platform was rebranded as QuantumATK and fully integrated into Synopsys’s TCAD suite. Today, QuantumATK continues to serve the global atomistic modeling community with robust capabilities in DFT, semiempirical methods, molecular dynamics, and seamless interfacing with other Synopsys simulation tools.