Week In Review: Design, Low Power

M&A
Goodix acquired Dream Chip Technologies. Shenzhen-based Goodix is known for fingerprint and other biometric sensors and authentication solutions, as well as Arm and RISC-V based MCUs. It is reportedly among the ten largest Chinese chipmakers, according to EqualOcean. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Based in Garbsen, Germany, Dream Chip Technologies originally was founded in 1990 as Sican, with backing from the government of Lower Saxony, Germany. In 2000, the company was acquired by Infineon Technologies, where it operated as Sci-worx. The Sci-worx subsidiary was later sold to Silicon Image in 2007 in a ~$13.5M deal. In 2010, Dream Chip Technologies was formed following a management buyout of the subsidiary. The company provides and offers design services for ASICS, FPGAs, SoCs, and embedded systems, with a specialty in automotive vision systems.

Tools & IP
The ESD Alliance, as part of SEMI, Cadence, Mentor, and Synopsys today announced plans to jointly develop an industry-standard protocol to fight piracy of EDA software. To that goal, they will develop the SEMI Server Certification Protocol to define how servers can be uniquely identified, which would prevent cloning of a machine identifier with virtualization.

PUFsecurity launched quantum-tunneling PUF-based root-of-trust IP. The new PUFrt IP targets IoT devices and includes parent company eMemory’s NeoPUF technology. Provided functions include unique ID generation, a true random number generator, secure key storage, and provides improved connections between a system bus and function blocks that enhance attack resistance.

Metrics Design Automation’s SystemVerilog RTL Simulation Platform was integrated within Codasip’s SweRV Core Support Package, Professional version. Metrics’ simulator runs in the cloud with a SaaS model with SweRV and verification IP preloaded.

Aldec’s TySOM family of Xilinx Zynq SoC-based Embedded Development Kits were qualified for Amazon’s AWS IoT Greengrass. Greengrass Core allows edge devices to act on local data including running AWS Lambda functions, Docker containers, and executing predictions based on machine learning models, without Internet access. The TySOM boards can be used either as the main edge processing device or as a gateway to AWS.

Vodaphone utilized NXP Layerscape processors containing 4-core and 8-core Arm Cortex-A72 in its Universal Customer Premises Equipment (uCPE), which can be provisioned or reprogrammed in tandem with network functions virtualization to take the role of devices such as SD-WAN, routers, and firewalls.

Numbers
Ansys reported second quarter 2020 financial results with revenue of $385.7 million, up 4.6% compared to the same quarter last year. On a GAAP basis, earnings per share were $1.11 for Q2 2020, down 23.3% from $1.28 in Q2 2019. Non-GAAP earnings per share were $1.55 in Q2 2020, down 3.7% from $1.61 in the same quarter last year. Ansys noted that revenue, operating margins and earnings exceeded the high end of financial guidance.

Rambus reported financial results for the second quarter of 2020 with revenue of $59.9 million, up 2.7% from the second quarter of 2019. On a GAAP basis, the company had a net loss per share of $0.09 in Q2 2020, improved from a net loss of $0.33 in Q2 2019. Rambus reported that revenue and profit were at the high end of its expectations.

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