Keysight Acquires Cliosoft

Keysight announced today that it has acquired Cliosoft, adding IP data management and design data to its EDA portfolio.

The deal comes at a time when chip designs are becoming more heterogeneous and customized, making it more difficult to keep track of a growing number of IP assets. What works for one market or sub-market may not be optimal for another. That could include everything from different manufacturing processes from the same or different foundries, different memory types and configurations, and different versions of the same IP within the same company.

This potentially becomes even more complex as chipmakers transition toward chiplets, where chipmakers will be able to choose from a variety of options from multiple vendors. But to fully utilize that approach, they will be required to track licenses from one project to the next, including details about power, heat, noise, supported protocols, and what kinds of problems were encountered using that IP in the past.

“Customers have to innovate faster, they have to reduce cost, and they need to reduce risk,” said Niels Faché, vice president and general manager of PathWave Software Solutions at Keysight. “At the same time, they deal with complexities that require multi-technology capabilities. And all of that requires a more automated, integrated workflow with tools working together so data is seamlessly transferred from one phase to the next. That’s the backdrop for this acquisition, and that’s why the timing is right.”

Simon Rance, vice president of marketing at Cliosoft, said the deal will extend the partnership his company already had with Keysight, providing a collaborative platform for design on top of a data management layer. “The bigger vision is how we’re going to manage silicon lifecycle, from spec to tape-out. So you can have a data management and IP management layer and visibility into that data, and that ties into Keysight’s design and test software. The bigger vision is how to scale to chiplets and beyond, to the point where you have a physical product.”

Those tools also will integrate with other EDA vendors’ products, Faché said, enabling those same capabilities across different design environments. “This is a vendor-agnostic approach,” he said. “We’re not going to change that. That would undermine the value of this deal. And our customers are going to generate data with different tools from different sources. We cannot limit where the data comes from, and we recognize that it’s in our customers’ best interest to collaborate with multiple vendors.”

Faché said the deal has been under discussion for the past year. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, as they have no material impact on Keysight.