IP-SoC 2011is the 20[SUP]th[/SUP] anniversary for the first Conference completely dedicated to IP. IP market is a small world, as EDA a small market if you look at the generated revenue… but both are essential building blocks for the semiconductor industry. It was not clear back in 1995 that IP will become essential: at that time,… Read More
Synopsys acquires Magma
So Synopsys announced today that it has signed an agreement to acquire Magma. There will be a regulatory delay etc before it finally closes.
So why did they do it? Despite Magma being thought of as a place and route company, they have two other product that are perhaps more significant for Synopsys: FineSim and Tekton.
FineSim, Magma’s… Read More
Blitz, blazing fast layout
One of the challenges with today’s SoCs is that chip-finishing, putting the final touches to the SoC working at the chip level, stresses layout editors to the limit. Either they run out of capacity to load the entire chip, or they can handle the entire chip but everything is like wading through molasses, it takes an awfully … Read More
A tribute to Research on Interface IP Market
Denali acquisition by Cadence in May 2010, ChipIdea, Virage Logic, and nSys acquisitions by Synopsys in 2009, 2010 and 2011 (resp.) shows that IP market is consolidating… but new IP vendors are still emerging! So we need to know on which product the Interface IP market leader will tend to a dominant position, which new products… Read More
Not your father’s Tensilica
Tensilica has been around for quite a long time. Their key technology is a system for generating a custom processor, the idea being to better match the requirement of the processor for performance, power and area as compared with a fully-general purpose control processor (such as one of the ARM processors). Of course generating… Read More
Semiconductor Power Consumption and Fingertop Computing!
Can semiconductor devices change the temperature of the earth? The heat from my Dell XPS changes the temperature of my lap! A 63” flat screen TV changes the temperature of my living room. I just purchased six of the latest iPhones for my family (under duress) and signed up for another two years with Verizon, so our carbon footprint … Read More
SPICE Circuit Simulation at Magma
All four of the public EDA companies offer SPICE circuit simulation tools for use by IC designers at the transistor-level, and Magma has been offering two SPICE circuit simulators:
- FineSIM SPICE (parallel SPICE)
- FineSIM PRO (accelerated, parallel SPICE)
An early advantage offered by Magma was a SPICE simulator that could be … Read More
Old standards never die
I just put up a blog about the EDA interoperability forum, much of which is focused on standards. Which reminded me just how long-lived some standards turn out to be.
Back in the late 1970s Calma shipped workstations (actually re-badged Data General minicomputers) with a graphic display. That was how layout was done. It’s… Read More
Using Processors in the SoC Dataplane
Almost any chip of any complexity contains a control processor of some sort. These blocks are good at executing a wide range of algorithms but there are often two problems with them: the performance is inadequate for some application or the amount of power required is much too high. Control processors pay in limited performance … Read More
TSMC ASIC versus IBM ASIC!
Lunch with Jim Lai, President of Global Unichip(GUC), was the highlight of my week, I had a very nice crab cake salad. As you may have read, GUC announced itself as the “Flexible ASIC Leader” taking direct aim at the traditional ASIC market led by the likes of IBM, ST Micro, TI, Renesas, and Samsung. This will be like “shooting fish in… Read More
Micron- “The first cut isn’t the deepest”- Chops production & forecast further