Altair continues to expand its portfolio, yesterday adding MODELiiS, a French supplier of electronic design automation (EDA) software for circuit design and simulation. MODELiiS spun out of an entity called EASii IC, which develops Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) and other electronics for clients; MODELIiiS is a set of digital and analog system modeling tools developed over the last 15 years and commercialized in 2015.

EDA is totally not my area of expertise, so I don’t really know other than to be impressed when MODELiiS throws around terms like “SPICE parser and elaborator”, but Altair CEO Jim Scapa says that MODELiiS expands Altair’s EDA capabilities “to deliver the most relevant, optimal, simulation-driven design solutions for IoT. Simulation and optimization are fundamental to the design of communication and controls for everything from personal devices to autonomous vehicles.”

As far as I can tell, MODELiiS is tiny and so would not add materially to Altair’s revenue or sales/service reach. But it sounds like a technology that can be used to create electronics-aware models of complex systems, for modeling in Altair’s HyperMath, LABVIEW, Modelica, MATLAB or similar tools.