The Week In Review: Design

Tools
CEVA integrated Bluetooth processing into its DSP cores. In addition to audio and video and always-on capabilities, the company is pitching the combination as an all-in-one, ultra-low-power solution for the wearable electronics market.

So how big is this market opportunity? IDC predicts the wearable computing market will grow from 19.2 million units this year to 112 million units in 2018, and it’s beginning to gain some critical mass on the IP front. Proof point: Sonics extended its on-chip network to wearable electronics, adding more configurability to reduce latency by as much as 40% over the previous generation. The technology now scales from wearables all the way up to high-end communications applications.

Synopsys rolled out new femtoPHY IP for USB 3.0 and 2.0 that requires half the area of previous PHYs. It is qualified for use on 14nm finFET processes and 28nm.

Coverity, which is wholly owned by Synopsys, rolled out an update to fix the Heartbleed security hole in OpenSSL. The company has a number of online resources for finding and fixing the security hole.

Deals
Atmel joined Mentor Graphics’ embedded RTOS program for the IoT market. The two companies plan to collaborate on medical, industrial, smart energy and consumer applications.

Sonic Emotion, which makes 3D post-processing audio, optimized its software for Cadence’s audio/voice DSP family. The companies said this is the first time that software has been ported to a licensable DSP core.

Synopsys won a deal with Mellanox Technologies, which will standardize on Synopsys’ synthesis tools. Mellanox, which is jointly headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., and Yokneam, Israel, makes Infiniband and Ethernet interconnect solutions.

Synopsys also won a deal with Dialog Semiconductor, which is using Synopsys’ test products for its mixed-signal designs. And Synopsys won a deal with Centaur Technology, which is using Synopsys’ tool for implementation and verification of ECOs.

NXP won a deal for supplemental access control electronic passports based on its secure microcontrollers with the German and Swiss governments.

Numbers
CEVA reported its Q1 financial numbers. Total revenues were $13.7 million, up from $12.1 million for the same period in 2012. Net income was $2.0 million, up from $1.7 million in 2012.