The Week In Review: Design/IoT

Numbers

EDA sales dropped 1.9% in Q4 of 2015, following a spectacular run of 23 consecutive quarters of solid growth, according to EDAC. For the year, the EDA and IP industry posted 5% growth. At the same time, IP revenue grew 9.2% to $702.2 million, making it the first time ever that IP surpassed CAE revenue. Services revenue also grew 5.4% year over year to 107.1 million.

A new report from Research and Markets expects IP to continue doing well, with a market of $7.01 billion by 2022 from $3.09 billion in 2015, at a CAGR of 10.55% between 2016 and 2022. Asia-Pacific is the fastest growing market.

People

Andy Grove, former CEO and Chairman of Intel, passed away this week at the age of 79. Born András Gróf in Budapest, Hungary, Grove immigrated to the United States in 1956-7 having survived Nazi occupation and escaped Soviet repression. Present at the company’s founding in 1968, Grove played a critical role in the decision to move Intel’s focus from memory chips to microprocessors.

Tools

Synopsys unveiled a new simulation technology, Cheetah, which utilizes fine-grained parallelism to break down a design model into micro-tasks and events that can then be massively parallelized. In heterogeneous environments with a mix of CPUs, GPUs, and hybrid architectures, Synopsys says it can speed-up simulation by up to 5X on RTL and up to 30X on gate-level designs. The technology will be rolled out over the next two years as part of the VCS functional verification platform.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise servers HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen9 and HPE ProLiant DL580 Gen9 have been qualified for use with Mentor’s emulation platform. According to the company, these servers combined with recent updates reduce the compile time for the platform by up to 50%.

MathWorks released a new version of MATLAB, adding the ability to write, run, and modify code in a single interactive environment to accelerate exploratory analysis, and an environment that simplifies the process of building MATLAB apps.

Synopsys updated its static timing analysis tool with an eye to FinFETs, including a 2X overall faster run time, 16 core scalability, and tighter correlation of graph-based analysis to path-based analysis through parametric on-chip variation technology.

IoT, Automotive & Chips

EnSilica launched a Kalman Filter acceleration IP core for use in situational awareness radar sensors for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). According to the company, the IP provides an estimated speed improvement over software-only solutions of up to 10x.

NXP introduced a new quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 based device targeting CPE and vCPE markets. The chip has a 7W power envelope and integrated packet processing acceleration up to 2 GHz. NXP also released a multi-standard wireless charging solution that simultaneously supports both 15W WPC Qi and 5W PMA standards.

The BBC micro:bit project began rolling out, putting the pocket-sized device in the hands of to up to 1 million children in the UK aged 11 or 12. The initiative seeks to emulate the success of the BBC Micro program in the 1980s and inspire engineering and coding engagement at a young age. The computers feature ARM-based NXP microprocessors and Nordic Bluetooth chips.

Deals

Cadence won a deal with smart antenna system provider Ethertronics, who used Cadence’s ECO Designer to completely redesign the digital interface section of a complex RF/mixed-signal design by reusing transistors in the base layers, enabling the redesign in a metal only change.