Ansys
More info
- Creator
- John Swanson
- Released
- 1970
- Owner
- Synopsys (since 2025)
- Type
- Simulation software
The simulation software that tells you whether the bridge holds, the wing flutters or the chip overheats before anyone builds it.
John Swanson founded Swanson Analysis Systems in Pennsylvania in 1970 to sell a finite element analysis program: split a part into thousands of small elements and solve the stress equations for each one. The program was called Ansys, and in 1994 the company took the same name. Buying Fluent in 2006 added fluid dynamics, and since then it covers more or less every kind of physics an engineer might want to simulate.
In 2024 Synopsys agreed to buy Ansys for roughly 35 billion dollars, closing in 2025. The logic: once chips are stacked in three dimensions, simulating the logic is not enough — heat, mechanical stress and electromagnetics have to be part of the same flow.