What is the total cost of owning a CAD flow?

CAD flow may start out as simple shell scripts or makefiles that you can create in hours or days.  But as your needs grow, such as

• Adding new tools
• Adding new methodologies (design explorations, verification regression, functional safety, design for test, design for yield, etc.)
• Adding new infrastructure (Compute farm (LSF), Cloud, emulators, prototyping board, etc.)
• Adding more users
• Adding more features/capabilities (license optimization, disk space optimization, etc.)
• …

Those few lines of shell scripts of simple makefiles will start to look like a software project.  For example, a verification regression flow for a successful semiconductor company can consist of 10,000+ lines of python/Perl code.  Owning such software would require teams of engineers, regular bug/enhancement support, training, etc.