Mentor Buys Oasys

Mentor Buys Oasys
by Paul McLellan on 12-14-2013 at 1:24 pm

Mentor is acquiring Oasys, subject to all the usual caveats about shareholder and regulatory approval. The shareholder paperwork went out earlier this week. The common stock is valueless so presumably the price is low (and Mentor historically has not paid high prices for its acquisitions).

So what is going to happen with the technology?… Read More


Floorplanning Merged With Synthesis

Floorplanning Merged With Synthesis
by Paul McLellan on 10-02-2013 at 2:45 pm

One area of iteration that is becoming more problematic is between floorplanning and synthesis. So much of timing is driven by placement that fixing timing and even power often involves not just re-synthesis and re-placement but alterations to the floorplan. The Achilles heel of existing methods is that floorplanning tools … Read More


Oasys Bakes a PIE

Oasys Bakes a PIE
by Paul McLellan on 07-17-2013 at 3:01 pm

One challenge in building a modern SoC is that you want to minimize power, performance and area (PPA) while still getting your chip to market on schedule. Realistically, you can’t actually minimize all of these at once since they are tradeoffs: speeding up a critical path often involves upsizing drivers to larger cells which… Read More


Oasys Announces Floorplan Compiler

Oasys Announces Floorplan Compiler
by Paul McLellan on 05-19-2013 at 5:58 pm

Today Oasys announced the availability of Floorplan Compiler in the Oasys RealTime suite of physical RTL exploration and synthesis tools. This is actually a repackaging of a capability that has always been in RealTime Designer, and in fact has been an important aspect of how well RealTime Designer has performed in benchmarks … Read More


A Big Boost for Equivalency Checking

A Big Boost for Equivalency Checking
by Daniel Payne on 05-12-2013 at 1:41 pm

Thirty years ago in 1983 Professor Daniel Gajski and Kuhn created the now famous Y-Chart to show the various levels of abstraction in electronic system design:

We can still use this Y-Chart today because it still pertains to how engineers are doing their SoC designs. Along the Behavioral axis there is a need to know that each level… Read More


Costello and Hogan Rock the House at Cadence EDAC ECC Event

Costello and Hogan Rock the House at Cadence EDAC ECC Event
by Randy Smith on 05-02-2013 at 9:00 pm

No one who spent much time at Cadence during Joe Costello‘s reign as CEO (1987-1997, including SDA) could likely give an unbiased review of last night’s event, EDAC – Jim Hogan Emerging Companies Series. The event was held at Cadence’s 5-story Building 10, a building that had not yet been built while Joe… 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


Integrating Formal Verification into Synthesis

Integrating Formal Verification into Synthesis
by Paul McLellan on 03-05-2013 at 1:29 pm

Formal verification can be used for many things, but one is to ensure that synthesis performs correctly and that the behavior of the output netlist is the same as the behavior of the input RTL. But designs are getting very large and formal verification is a complex tool to use, especially if the design is too large for the formal tool… Read More