Week In Review: Design

Acquisitions
Marvell signed a definitive agreement to buy Cavium for roughly $6 billion. The deal is expected to close in mid-2018. The Cavium deal fits squarely on the cloud side and gives Marvell a much bigger reach into enterprise networking and infrastructure, as well as some developing markets.

Siemens paid an undisclosed price to buy Solido Design Automation, which tracks variation in complex designs. This extends the reach of Mentor and its parent company, Siemens, deeper into variation-aware design.

Security
Intel has identified product security issues involving firmware across a number of its processors. “In response to issues identified by external researchers, Intel has performed an in-depth comprehensive security review of its Intel Management Engine (ME), Intel Trusted Execution Engine (TXE), and Intel Server Platform Services (SPS) with the objective of enhancing firmware resilience,” the company said in a statement. “As a result, Intel has identified several security vulnerabilities that could potentially place impacted platforms at risk. Systems using ME Firmware versions 11.0/11.5/11.6/11.7/11.10/11.20, SPS Firmware version 4.0, and TXE version 3.0 are impacted.” Intel gave this a severity rating of “Important,” which is the second-highest threat level. A detection tool has been published to identify if systems have been exposed.

Collaborations
Arm and Nano Global, an Austin-based molecular data company, have joined forces to develop an AI chip for the health care industry. According to the statement issued by Nano Global, “The pioneering system-on-chip (SoC) will yield highly-secure molecular data that can be used in the recognition and analysis of health threats caused by pathogens and other living organisms. Combined with the company’s scientific technology platform, the chip leverages advances in nanotechnology, optics, artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain authentication, and edge computing to access and analyze molecular-level data in real time.” First delivery of the chip is expected by 2020.

People
Cadence appointed Anirudh Devgan as president. Devgan will report to CEO Lip-Bu Tan and oversee Cadence’s EDA business, as well as corporate strategy, marketing and business development functions.

Products
Synopsys uncorked a new release of LucidShape CAA V5 Based Software for automotive optical simulation and analysis.

Broadcom announced 7nm IP for an ASIC platform for deep learning and networking applications.

Microsemi announced a new IEEE Timing Synchronization Module.