The Week In Review: Design/IoT

EDA & IP

EDA revenues increased 7.1% for Q3 2015, according to the EDA Consortium, upping the number to $1957.5 million, compared to $1828.1 million in Q3 2014. The four-quarters moving average also jumped by 8.8%. IC Physical Design & Verification saw the biggest gains, with a 14% increase compared to Q3 2014 and $407.9 million in revenue for the quarter. IP was runner up, with $652.9 million in revenues, an 11.4% increase compared to Q3 2014, and a four-quarters moving average up 19%. Services and PCB revenue both declined, by 11.4% and 3% respectively.

VeriSilicon completed its acquisition of Vivante, adding Vivante’s GPU and vision image processing in an all-stock deal. Terms were not disclosed, but the companies estimate a combined revenue of more than $180 million.

Synopsys updated its Coverity automated static analysis tool, adding support for new programming languages, enhanced security testing capabilities, and additional integration support for a number of development tools and environments.

Keysight debuted two new electromagnetic software solutions designed to help signal integrity and power integrity engineers improve high-speed link performance in PCB designs.

Imagination uncorked two new GPU IP cores, adding support for OpenCL 2.0 and improving power/performance/area for vision applications.

Mentor Graphics received the 2015 “Best Design Solution” Supplier Award from specialty foundry TowerJazz.

IoT, Automotive & Chips

There’s a new face on the semiconductor block: Amazon is making chips. Specifically, Annapurna Labs – a formerly Israeli-based company acquired early last year for around $350 million – is, and has now presented a portfolio of platforms that use 32-bit ARMv7 and 64-bit ARMv8 architectures to target home gateways, Wi-Fi routers, and Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices.

NXP went prepared to CES with several new proposals: a Bluetooth Low Energy SoC which the company says gives 2X times longer battery life for wearable and fitness tracking devices; a tiny 77GHz radar transceiver (7.5×7.5 mm) for use in ADAS with very high resolution performance; and a collaboration with earphone manufacturer BRAGI on a set of smart wireless earphones.

Marvell also had a slew of announcements this week: a full-featured NFC Controller with Active Load Modulation to support the smallest antenna sizes for mobile, IoT, wearable and automotive applications; expansion of its NVMe SSD controller technology to support Host Memory Buffer, an NVMe revision 1.2 feature; Addition of IoT communications platform Google Weave to several of its Wi-Fi microcontroller SoCs; and a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2 (with future Bluetooth 5.0 features) low-power wireless SoC which the company says offers the smallest foot print and lowest bill of material for wearbles and IoT.

Deals

Samsung licensed Arteris’ interconnect IP for use within in its Visual Display business. Samsung cited quality-of-service and debugging features, along with multi-protocol support as key factors.

SK Hynix reported first-pass silicon success for its 64 GB Universal Flash Storage 2.0 device using Synopsys’ DesignWare UFS Host Controller, UniPro Host Controller and M-PHY IP.

Cadence’s Tensilica HiFi DSP got some action: it’s now approved for using the Dolby MS12 Multistream Decoder, an all-in-one audio solution for TVs with universal decoding; DSP Concepts optimized its graphical audio development tool Audio Weaver for the DSP; and dbx-tv made its Total Technology audio enhancement suite available for it, too.