Week In Review: Design, Low Power

Synaptics will acquire DSP Group, a provider of voice and wireless chipset solutions for converged communications, at $22.00 per share in an all-cash transaction. The deal is worth $538 million. “We continue to invest in technologies that tilt our product mix toward IoT applications,” said Michael Hurlston, President and CEO of Synaptics. “DSP Group’s expertise in SmartVoice and ULE wireless solutions, coupled with Synaptics’ leadership position in far-field speech recognition and IoT directed Wi-Fi/BT combos enables us to deliver increasingly differentiated solutions to our combined customer base, while positioning us to lead the transition to AI enabled devices at the edge of the network.” DSP Group was founded in 1987 and based in San Jose, Calif.

Ansys will acquire Zemax, a provider of high-performance optical imaging system simulation software. The acquisition will give Ansys end-to-end solutions for simulating sophisticated optical- and photonics-enabled products. “Our mission is enabling customers to design sophisticated optical products and bring them to market faster,” said S. Subbiah, CEO of Zemax. “By joining forces with Ansys, we will quickly deliver Zemax’s gold-standard imaging products to a wider audience and have an even greater impact on optical product development. It is a winning combination for our customers and for Ansys users across the globe.” Based in Kirkland, Wash., Zemax was founded in 1990 and is currently owned by EQT Private Equity. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2021.

Renesas completed its acquisition of Dialog Semiconductor, a deal worth EUR 4.8 billion (~$5.7B). Dialog provides battery and power management, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth low energy, and industrial edge computing solutions. “We are excited to welcome the talented team of Dialog employees, as well as the customers and suppliers of Dialog to the Renesas community,” said Hidetoshi Shibata, President & CEO of Renesas. “The combination augments engineering scale and delivers a diversified product portfolio across multiple, attractive end markets. Together, we are positioned to capitalize on an array of growing opportunities including the IoT, industrial, and automotive fields.”

Synopsys completed the acquisition of BISTel’s semiconductor and flat panel display solutions. The acquisition expands Synopsys’ process control solutions for semiconductor fabs with an integrated yield management and prediction solution to enhance manufacturing quality and efficiency.

Tools & IP
SEMI and the ESD Alliance announced the anti-piracy SEMI Server Certification Protocol (SSCP). The SSCP, approved by development committee members Cadence, Siemens EDA, and Synopsys, uniquely identifies each customer license server to assure that licenses are issued only by authorized servers to help protect against software piracy. The SCCP is now undergoing standardization and will be managed by the SEMI Standards group after its finalization as an industry standard. The committee members intend to implement the protocol in their respective license management software.

Rambus demonstrated its PCI Express (PCIe) 5.0 digital controller IP, reaching 32 GT/s on FPGA platforms using a soft controller. “With the growing importance of FPGAs in markets from defense to the data center, this solution developed by the newly-acquired PLDA team expands the Rambus portfolio and offers the next level of performance for mission-critical applications,” said Scott Houghton, general manager of Interface IP at Rambus.

Global Unichip Corp. (GUC) announced its second generation multi-die interlink product, GLink 2.0, on TSMC 5nm. It supports InFO_oS and all CoWoS types and is capable of transferring 1.3 Tbps of full duplex traffic per every mm of beachfront.

Automotive
Xilinx and Motovis teamed up on a solution that pairs the Xilinx Automotive Zynq SoC platform and Motovis’ convolutional neural network IP for the automotive market, specifically for forward camera systems’ vehicle perception and control. Forward camera systems help ADAS provide lane-keeping assistance, automatic emergency braking, and adaptive cruise control. The solution supports a range of parameters necessary for the European New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) 2022 requirements.

Infineon Technologies and Panasonic Corporation will jointly develop and produce the second generation of their gallium nitride (GaN) technology, a 650 V GaN HEMT targeting high- and low-power SMPS applications, renewables, and motor drive applications.

Quantum computing
sureCore is developing a range of CMOS IP suitable for operation at the extremely low temperature required for quantum computing applications, enabling control chips that can be co-located with the qubits in the cryostat.

IISC Bangalore, IIT Roorkee, C-DAC, and India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) launched a quantum computer simulator toolkit, called QSim. QSim allows researchers and students to write and debug code for developing quantum algorithms. It helps simulate quantum circuits with and without noise and test how well various algorithms work with imperfect quantum components.

People
Silvaco CEO Babak Taheri resigned. The company said it is looking for a replacement.