Siemens To Buy Mentor For $4.5B


By Ed Sperling & Jeff Dorsch Siemens announced today that it has reached a deal to buy Mentor Graphics for $4.5 billion in cash. The move, if approved by regulators, would greatly expand Siemens' capabilities in multi-physics design and embedded software for everything from semiconductors to automotive wiring harnesses. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2017. Sie... » read more

Partitioning For Power


Examine any smartphone design today and most of the electronic circuitry is "off" most of the time. And regardless of how many processor cores are available, it's rare to use more than a couple of those cores at any point in time. The emphasis is shifting, though, as the mobility market flattens and other markets such as driver-assisted vehicles and IoT begin gaining traction. In a car, turn... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Synopsys added to its software integrity and security business with the acquisition of services company Cigital and its 2015 spinout focused on tools, Codiscope. Cigital specializes in professional and managed services for identifying, remediating and preventing vulnerabilities in software applications. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Tools Mentor Graphics rolled out a new pl... » read more

Architecting For Energy


Most of the time, electrical design engineers create their designs by putting in the functions first, then going back later to figure out what they can afford to shut down. But with energy harvesting, this is flipped, and the systems must be built to normally be ‘off,’ and with a clear understanding of the minimum power requirements. Also, most of the time, energy harvesting systems are ... » read more

Need Emulation Now? You’ve Got It


Did you know that the way companies use hardware emulation has changed? Until recently, companies had no choice but to house their emulators in a lab and hard wire them (using lots of wires) to other supporting hardware and workstations dedicated to a single project at a time. The emulator and its set up was accessible to users at only that location and switching between projects was difficu... » read more

The Time Dimension Of Power


Power is the flow of energy over time. While both aspects of that equation are important, they are important to different people in different ways. Energy that moves too quickly can cause significant damage. Too much energy moving over time can mean a non-competitive product, from battery-powered devices to a wide array of locations such as the datacenter. When the industry talks about power... » read more

Energy Harvesting Gains Steam


Energy harvesting is gaining traction with a surge in ultra-low-power IoT applications, ranging from inventory tracking, wearables and drones, to vibration sensors for motors in industrial settings. The idea that machines could run without batteries—or that energy could be harvested either from motion or ambient sound waves or chemical reactions to augment battery power—has been in the w... » read more

Toward Real-World Power Analysis


The expansion of emulation into new fields, rather than just functional verification, is making it possible to do power analysis over longer spans of time. The result is a fast and effective way to analyze real-world scenarios. This is a new field, and it marks a new use of this technology. While it is still evolving, several ideas have surfaced about the best methodology and the best way to... » read more

24 x 7 Productivity


Emulators are now managed as a corporate-wide shared resource in a datacenter, but standard job management software does not allow companies to take full advantage of emulator resources and capabilities. The Veloce Enterprise Server App (Veloce ES) delivers a fully-integrated solution for complete, transparent access to emulation resources for concurrent projects worldwide. It significantly enh... » read more

Blog Review: Nov. 9


Mentor's Andrew Patterson highlights two of the main debates around IoT: how to connect and how much security is enough. Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out one company's design for a dataflow processing unit to speed up deep learning networks. Prepare for USB to be everywhere in the autonomous car, says Synopsys' Eric Huang. Rambus' Aharon Etengoff argues that the end of Dennard Scalin... » read more

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