Week In Review: Design, Low Power

Everspin and Seagate inked a patent cross-licensing agreement, including the assignment and licensing of MRAM patents from Seagate to Everspin as well as licensing of specific Tunneling Magnetoresistance (TMR) patents from Everspin to Seagate, which will be used in HDD read/write head technology.

Subaru utilized ANSYS’ SCADE suite for critical control systems to design and validate embedded software for its new e-Boxer hybrid electric vehicle power unit system. Subaru cited the ability to development automation to 95%, reducing costs, production time and the amount of documentation required for final code verification.

Tortuga Logic independently verified the security of the Rambus CryptoManager Root of Trust using its Radix security verification framework. Radix scans a system’s hardware and software during the pre-silicon design and verification stages to detect and prevent system-level vulnerabilities.

Arm reported financial results for the first quarter 2019 with revenue of $418 million, up 9.7% from the first quarter of last year. Licensing revenue was up 47% to $125 million, while royalties revenue fell 8% to $240 million. The company also saw a jump in revenue of 51% for its software and services, rising to $53 million. The company’s Cortex-M line remains the largest for number of licenses expected to continue generating a royalty.

Market research firm IC Insights predicts that while the microcontroller market fell about 13% in the first half of 2019, the year will end with only a 5.8% decline in sales and fall just $1 billion shy of 2018’s record $17.6 billion. Shipments are expected to fall 4% for the year. In 2020, however, the MCU market is expected to grow 3.2% with shipments up 7%, accompanied by a CAGR of 6.3% over the next five years.

Plus, check out upcoming semiconductor conferences and events: Hot Chips will be held Aug. 18-21 at Stanford University, CA, while Western Digital will hold a RISC-V meetup Aug. 21 in Austin, TX. In India, Cadence will host CDNLive Aug. 28-29 in Bengaluru, and Mentor will host its Forum for Verification on Aug. 28 in Bangalore and Aug. 30 in Hyderabad.