The Week In Review: Design


M&A Barco Silex, now named Silex Inside, split from parent company Barco in a management buyout in partnership with a group of private investors lead by Dutch investment company Vehold BV. The company will continue its focus on security, video compression, and interface IP, along with design services. Tools & IP Mentor is making a version of its HyperLynx design rule checking tool ... » read more

EDA, IP Sales Up 8%


The EDA sector continues to exhibit solid growth, increasing 8% to $2.2262 billion in Q3, up from $2.0937 billion in the same period in 2016, according to the most recent stats from the ESD Alliance Market Statistics Service. The four-quarter moving average was up 11.5%, year over year. While all of the numbers were up, two areas showed extraordinary growth. One involved Japan, which showed ... » read more

Reflection On 2017: Design And EDA


People love to make predictions, and most of the time they have it easy, but at Semiconductor Engineering, we ask them to look back on the predictions they make each year and to assess how close to the mark they were. We see what they missed and what surprised them. Not everyone accepts our offer to grade themselves, but most have this year. (Part one looked at the predictions associated with s... » read more

Women In Power


This is not my usual, technically-focused report, but it's important sometimes to reflect on the human side of the industry, which can seem woefully absent at times in the scramble to get projects out the door and meet quarterly numbers. This past Tuesday, November 28, I moderated a panel of women who are truly inspirational for the achievements in their respective parts of the industry, an... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Imperas debuted its RISC-V Processor Developer Suite, a set of models, a software simulator, and tools to validate, verify, and provide early estimation of timing performance and power consumption for RISC-V processors. IP Minima Processor revealed its dynamic-margining subsystem IP for near-threshold voltage design. The startup's hardware and software IP works with a CPU or DSP proc... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Aldec released the latest version of its Riviera-PRO verification platform, adding QEMU Bridge to enable hardware/software co-simulation of designs intended to run on SoC FPGAs. Other features include improved performance when using code containing many inline randomized calls and up to 29% faster simulation speed of UVM. Pulsic added new features to its Unity Bus Planner for planning... » read more

Getting Power Management Right


Getting power management right in the era of heterogeneous SoCs is a multi-pronged effort, there's no getting around it. Engineering teams daily try to squeeze more and more power from their designs, which many times includes adding human resources and expertise to the project. Take an example where a design team leader gets the mandate to include high level synthesis in the design metho... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


IP Cryptographic flaws have been discovered in the IEEE P1735 standard for encrypting IP and managing access rights. A team from the University of Florida found "a surprising number of cryptographic mistakes in the standard. In the most egregious cases, these mistakes enable attack vectors that allow us to recover the entire underlying plaintext IP." The researchers warn that an adversary coul... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Synopsys will acquire Black Duck Software, a provider of software for securing and managing open source software. Synopsys already has a stake in this area from its Coverity acquisition in 2014, which it has been using to analyze security practices in open source software. Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Massachusetts, Black Duck's products automate the process of identifying and ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Imagination will sell its MIPS business to Tallwood, a California-based venture capital firm, for $65m in cash. The sale is expected to close in October. The rest of Imagination is slated to be sold to Canyon Bridge for £550 million in cash (~$740 million), a deal dependent on the MIPS sale. The Chinese-backed investment firm has featured recently in the news for its attempted purchas... » read more

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