The Week In Review: Design/IoT

M&A

Mentor Graphics acquired the rest of Calypto. In 2011, Mentor sold Calypto their high-level synthesis solution – Catapult – in exchange for 51% of the company, but left it as a fully standalone entity. Calypto will now be merged into Mentor as a standalone business unit.

Tools

Synopsys released its HAPS-80 FPGA-based prototyping system. According to Synopsys, the system provides up to 100 MHz multi-FPGA performance and new automated high-speed pin-multiplexing. Enterprise configurations support up to 1.6 billion ASIC gates based on the Xilinx Virtex UltraScale FPGA and enable remote usage and multi-design mode for concurrent design execution.

Altium will announce the next major update to their flagship PCB design tool at PCB West in Santa Clara. The update, scheduled for release in the fall, adds a new alternative part choice system, visual clearance boundaries which provide designers with an understanding of the impact of their routing decisions in real-time with visual clearance boundaries between objects on a board, and a new component placement system.

Deals

eSilicon, Northwest Logic and SK Hynix created a fully working high-bandwidth memory (HBM) hardware demonstration. The demonstration uses an advanced FPGA containing Northwest Logic’s HBM Controller Core and FPGA-based HBM PHY and SK Hynix HBM devices. eSilicon packaged the FPGA and HBM devices on an organic interposer.

There was a wave of certifications for v0.9 of TSMC’s 10nm FinFET process, with Ansys, Cadence, Mentor, and Synopsys all making announcements. Additionally, Cadence’s Allegro SiP tools and PVS solutions have been enabled for TSMC’s Integrated Fan-Out (InFO) packaging technology, and Synopsys reported successful tape-out of IP for the process, including USB 3.1, USB 3.0, USB 2.0, HSIC, PCI Express 3.0, PCI Express 2.0 and MIPI D-PHY.

Financing

Memory company Crossbar completed a $35 million Series D funding round. Tyche Partners, Oriza Holdings and Cheerful Link joined Crossbar’s existing investors in the round, bringing total investment to $85 million to date. The company’s RRAM technology was originally developed at the University of Michigan, with Crossbar being the exclusive licensee.