The Week In Review: Design/IoT

Mergers & Acquisitions

Zuken acquired one of its USA resellers, electrical applications provider Caetek. The company also developed software for harness manufacturers that integrated with Zuken’s electrical wiring, control systems and fluid engineering toolset.

The NXP-Freescale merger is, at last, official. The largest revenue source for the combined company will be automotive, projected to make up 40% of revenues, with security & connectivity closely trailing. The $1.8 billion acquisition by JAC Capital of NXP’s RF Power business, necessary for the merger, also finalized.

Tools

Cadence, Lumerical Solutions, and PhoeniX teamed up on an integrated electronic/photonic design automation environment for photonic ICs. The effort pulls in Lumerical’s time- and frequency-domain mixed-signal photonic circuit simulation engine, designed to account for multi-mode, multi-channel circuits prevalent in integrated photonics. PhoeniX added its layout generation of photonic elements, components and waveguide interconnects.

Synopsys updated its photonic component and optical communication system design suite. Additions include transceiver design and bit-error-rate estimation based on m-PAM and a model that combines multiple CW signals at the same wavelength into a single spatial field profile for the system design tool. The component design side has a new policy for cluster licensing for more flexible use of multicore CPU architectures. Plus, Synopsys has a new version of its software for the design of imaging optical systems with algorithmic enhancements to first-order computations during ray tracing of asymmetric optical systems and freeform surfaces.

Mentor Graphics released new multi-discipline systems engineering tools for the automotive and aerospace market, tackling optimization problems such as cost and weight by focusing on vehicle functions that will later be implemented as software, hardware, data communications, or electrical interconnect, and then assessing the impact of alternative implementations.

Deals

Sonics signed three new licensees for its flagship interconnect product. The new customers are all in China: ZTE, one of the country’s largest mobile technology companies; Artosyn, a provider of subsystems for drones; and an unnamed company which according to Sonics is a leading fabless provider of enterprise SSD chips.

To help boost the Hyperloop, Ansys opened up its portfolio of simulation tools to teams participating in a competition to design a pod for the proposed high-speed transit system. The designs, from university students and independent engineering teams, will be put to the test at a physical demonstration slated for the middle next year.