A Brief History of Chips and Technologies

A Brief History of Chips and Technologies
by Paul McLellan on 03-19-2013 at 4:26 pm

I talked to Dado Banatao today. He is managing partner at Tallwood Venture Capital today but back in the mid-1980s he was the founder of Chips and Technologies, the first fabless semiconductor company. The rumors that they had a hard time raising money because VCs couldn’t comprehend a fabless semiconductor company are … Read More


RealTime Register Retiming

RealTime Register Retiming
by Paul McLellan on 03-19-2013 at 7:00 am

I was at the EDAC CEO forecast meeting last week and one of the questions that was asked of EDAC members was “which is the hottest EDA startup?” The one with the most nominations was Oasys. So Oasys is hot.

But register retiming is hotter.

The latest announcement from Oasys this morning is that register retiming is now … Read More


Mobile: A Death in the Family

Mobile: A Death in the Family
by Paul McLellan on 03-18-2013 at 3:49 pm

So Ericsson Mobile Platforms is to be shut down, with the loss of around 1600 jobs. Not to mention billions of dollars that ST and Ericsson sunk into the joint venture in an attempt to create a competitor to Qualcomm.

The history actually goes back a bit further. Nokia originally had an internal semiconductor design group and in 2007… Read More


EDAC CEOs: consolidation, clouds, and whether Intel will buy Synopsys

EDAC CEOs: consolidation, clouds, and whether Intel will buy Synopsys
by Paul McLellan on 03-15-2013 at 5:12 pm

Yesterday evening was the annual EDAC CEO forecast meeting. Actually it is not really a forecast meeting any more, more a sort of CEO response to some survey questions asked of EDAC members. Rich Valera of Needham moderated with Lip-Bu, Aart and Wally, along with Simon Segars representing the IP arm(!) of the business and Raul Camposano… Read More


Costello on Communicating a Compelling Company Story

Costello on Communicating a Compelling Company Story
by Paul McLellan on 03-14-2013 at 11:53 pm

The next EDAC sponsored emerging company series (what I’ve been calling Hogan University) is Joe Costello being interviewed on how to communicate a compelling company story. Anyone who saw Joe’s keynote at DAC several years ago will not want to miss this. I can’t promise that he’ll lie down on the stage… Read More


Formal Verification of Power Intent

Formal Verification of Power Intent
by Paul McLellan on 03-13-2013 at 4:10 pm

I can’t imagine that any SoC today is designed without taking intense interest in how much power the chip will consume, whether it is destined for a mobile phone or tethered in a cloud datacenter. One challenge with power is that adding features like voltage islands or power-down areas require changes to the netlist such as… Read More


EDPS Monterey. Agenda Now Available

EDPS Monterey. Agenda Now Available
by Paul McLellan on 03-12-2013 at 8:13 pm

For 20 years there has been the Electronic Design Process Symposium. It has been held each April and for the last few years at least has always been in Monterey at the Monterey Beach Resort. This year it is Thursday and Friday April 18th/19th.

The keynote on the first day is by Ivo Bolsens of Xilinx on The All-programmable SoC —Read More


RTDA at Altera

RTDA at Altera
by Paul McLellan on 03-12-2013 at 8:05 pm

I talked to Yaron Kretchmer of Altera to find out how they are using RTDA’s products. I believe that Altera are the oldest customer of RTDA, dating back over 15 years, originally used by the operations team around the test floor before propagating out in the EDA and software worlds more recently.

Altera use two RTDA tools, LicenceMonitorRead More


Virtual Platforms, Acceleration, Emulation, FPGA Prototypes, Chips

Virtual Platforms, Acceleration, Emulation, FPGA Prototypes, Chips
by Paul McLellan on 03-12-2013 at 7:13 pm

At CDNLive today Frank Schirrmeister presented a nice overview of Cadence’s verification capabilities. The problem with verification is that you can’t have everything you want. What you really want is very fast runtimes, very accurate fidelity to the hardware and everything available very early in the design … Read More


Cadence To Acquire Tensilica

Cadence To Acquire Tensilica
by Paul McLellan on 03-11-2013 at 5:54 pm

You have probably already seen the news: Cadence is acquiring Tensilica for $380M. Cadence has been relatively late to the IP party compared to Synopsys. In contrast, Mentor was early, got into the IP business before it was really profitable and ended up shutting down the business.

Tensilica is quite sizable. It has over 200 licensees,… Read More