The Week In Review: Design

CEVA buys RivieraWaves; Mentor buys XS Embedded; new memory and IP; ARM gets grant for using gaming technology in movies; Cadence wins 28nm gigascale deal.

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M&A
CEVA bought RivieraWaves, which makes IP for WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. CEVA said the deal will boost its market to 35 billion connected devices within six years. The two companies have been collaborating in the WiFi market for the past couple of years. Total cost of the deal is $19 million.

Mentor Graphics acquired XS Embedded GmbH, a German-based developer of automotive-ready reference boards and systems architectures. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Mentor says the deal helps position it to address the Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and infotainment markets.

Tools & IP
Mentor Graphics added memory device models to its emulation portfolio to support the Hybrid Memory Cube, LPDDR4 and eMMC 5.0. The new models can be used for in-circuit, virtual lab and transaction-based emulation.

Synopsys rolled out non-volatile memory IP for high-voltage processes offers a 75% reduction in size for automotive ICs and speeds up programming time while reducing test time by 3X. It also is reprogrammable with a minimum of 15 years of retention time. Synopsys also added compliance test suites to its verification IP portfolio, including customized application-specific or corner-case tests.

Deals
ARM won a £1 million award from the U.K.’s Technology Strategy Board to bring real-time graphics rendering from ARM’s Geomerics unit to movies. The deal will leverage gaming technology in filmmaking, speeding up the rendering of complex animation.

Hitachi taped out a 28nm giga-scale design using Cadence’s timing signoff optimization and multi-corner parasitic extraction tools. Cadence said the closure time shrunk from two months to three weeks for a flat analysis of 50 million cells.



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