An Inside Look At The GlobalFoundries-IBM Deal


GlobalFoundries' proposed acquisition of IBM Microelectronics is the kind of deal that will have business schools talking for many years to come—a gargantuan combination of expertise and technology, built on the back of high-profile business successes and failures, long-running legal struggles and global politics—with far-reaching implications for all parts of the semiconductor supply chain... » read more

Executive Insight: Lucio Lanza


Lucio Lanza, managing director of Lanza techVentures, a former Intel engineer, and the 2014 Phil Kaufman Award winner, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the shrinking number of startups, future investments, new opportunities in EDA, Moore's Law and the Internet of Things. SE: You're one of the last VCs still actively investing in EDA. Why? Lanza: There are several indi... » read more

IBM Unloads Chip Biz To GF


By Ed Sperling & Mark LaPedus After months of on-again, off-again negotiations, [getentity id="22306" comment="IBM"] agreed to hand over its Microelectronics unit to [getentity id="22819" comment="GlobalFoundries"] for $1.5 billion—meaning IBM will actually pay GlobalFoundries that amount to get rid of what has become an albatross for Big Blue. To really sweeten the deal, GlobalFoundr... » read more

An Acquisition And A Merged Technology Strategy


A single chip capable of performing two different functions can reduce the amount of wiring needed to just one layer and it can reduce time to market by simplifying the supply chain and the planning process. Nowhere is this more evident than in the LCD chip market, where two different manufacturers were used to supply chips for touch panels. But an effort to consolidate them into a single ch... » read more

Executive Insight: Ajoy Bose


SE: What keeps you awake at night? Bose: What I worry about more than anything else is the need for us (at Atrenta) to show growth on an ongoing basis. A company’s challenges change with the lifecycle of that company. In the early days you worry about survival and trying to establish yourself in the industry. Fortunately, Atrenta is a bigger company today, so the nature of the concerns has c... » read more

Executive Insight: Simon Segars


SE: What concerns you most? Segars: In the context of design and where chip design is going, ARM is a long-term business. We’re doing stuff now that is going to ship in five years’ time. Obviously, for everyone in this space, Moore’s Law has been a fantastic thing. It’s enabled us to achieve really fantastic scaling of transistors, and everyone knows that is getting harder and harder... » read more

Cadence Gobbles Up Jasper


2012 was the year that everyone remembers Synopsys going on an acquisition binge, but 2014 will go down as the year that Cadence Design Systems decided that EDA was worth investing in. Rather than placing investment bets outside of its core competence, Cadence bought Forte in February and now adds Jasper Design Automation to its fold. Jasper started life as Tempus Fugit in 1999 and became Ja... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Synopsys rolled out a major new release of its place and route tool, the centerpiece of its physical design platform, offering up to 10X improvement in speed—a combination of 5X faster implementation and 2X larger capacity. Co-CEO Aart de Geus called it the most significant product in the company’s history. Synopsys also rolled out an AMS verification platform to accelerate regres... » read more

Synopsys-Coverity Deal Final


Synopsys’ acquisition of Coverity, which makes tools for testing and analyzing software, was made official yesterday. Now what? That may be the $334 million question, which is the price Synopsys paid for the 11-year-old software tools vendor. Even Synopsys’ top executives are rather candid in their uncertainty about where this deal will lead, and they made no qualms about that at the Syn... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Synopsys inked a deal to acquire Coverity, a San Francisco-based security startup that builds tools to test source code for defects and security risks, for $375 million. The purchase price is $350 million plus another $25 million in debt. The deal is expected to close in Synopsys’ fiscal Q2. The company announced its financial results for fiscal Q1 ended Jan. 31, as well. Revenue was $479.0 m... » read more

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