The Week In Review: Design

Tools

Mentor Graphics launched the company’s third generation data-center friendly emulation platform, Veloce Strato. The emulator has a capacity of 2.5BG when fully loaded, and total capacity can be increased by linking emulators. It has available slots for 64 Advanced Verification Boards (AVBs) and fully loaded consumes up to 50KW (22.7 W/Mgate) of power.

Aldec uncorked the latest version of its mixed-language design rule checking (DRC) and clock domain crossing (CDC) verification platform for FPGAs and ASICs. It replaces the company’s previous DRC tool and supports Verilog rule plugins, synthesizing black-box units on-the-fly, and CDC clock/reset debuggability extensions.

FPGAs

Microsemi debuted a new FPGA family optimized for low power at mid-range densities. They feature 12.7 Gbps SerDes transceivers developed with Silicon Creations and have total power of less than 90 milliwatts at 10 Gbps.

Intel announced two low-cost FPGAs. The Cyclone 10 GX supports 10G transceivers, hard floating point DSP, and targets industrial machine vision and smart city applications. The Cyclone 10 LP focuses on reduced power consumption and requires only two core power supplies for operation.

QuickLogic signed an agreement with a second top-tier foundry to port and market for licensing the company’s embedded FPGA technology on the foundry’s high volume 40nm process.

Numbers

Synopsys released financial results for the first quarter of 2017 with revenue of $652.8 million, up 14.8% from Q1 2016. On a GAAP Basis, earnings per share stood at $0.56 for the first quarter, up 43.5% from $0.39 per share in the same period last year. Non-GAAP earnings were $0.94 per share, up 38.2% from $0.68 per share in Q1 2016. This exceeded the company’s expectations, leading it to increase annual revenue, earnings per share and operating cash flow targets for the year.

People

Lu Dai, senior director of engineering at Qualcomm, was elected Accellera’s Chair of the Board. Dai has been a member of the Accellera Board of Directors for two years.

Related Stories
Embedded FPGAs Going Mainstream?
Programmable devices are being adopted in more market segments, but they still haven’t been included in major SoCs. That could change.
CPU, GPU, Or FPGA?
Need a low-power device design? What type of processor should you choose?
Hybrid Simulation Picks Up Steam
Using a combination of simulation and emulation can be beneficial to an SoC design project, but it isn’t always easy.