As a fitting postscript to my “Brief History of the Fabless Semiconductor Industry”, semiconductor research company IC Insights compiled a list of the top semiconductor companies for the first half of 2012. As the traditional IDMs go fabless and sink in the ratings, the foundries post record gains led by TSMC at 22%, GlobalFoundries… Read More
Another week in EDA and yet another acquisition by Synopsys as they buy SpringSoft this time for $406 million in cash. Paul McLellan wrote a good blog on this merger too.
Last week I blogged about the product overlap and integration challenges that Synopsys faces with the acquisition of Ciranova.
Let’s take a look at the IC … Read More
Today it was announced that Synopsys is acquiring SpringSoft for $406 million dollars ($12.2B Taiwanese). Coincidentally, I was in SpringSoft’s US office yesterday to talk about how Laker is being used for 20nm design. More of that later. But there was certainly nothing to indicate that anyone there was expecting this.… Read More
In 1985 Morris Chang was recruited by the Taiwanese government to help develop the emerging semiconductor industry. In 1986 Morris joined the Hsinchu based non profit research institute ITRI as Chairman and President and launched what would be TSMC’s first semiconductor wafer fabrication plant on the ITRI campus. Taiwan… Read More
Cadence has a series of webinars about their digital flow, focused on 28nm design. It is easy for all of us in the EDA ecosystem to assume that everyone is already doing 20/22nm design, if not 14nm already. But in fact most designs are still being done at 45nm and 65nm; 28nm is still a big challenging step.
One of the tools in the Cadence… Read More
Josefina Hobbs, a solutions architect at Synopsys, shows the integration of Synopsys Protocol Analyzer with SpringSoft’s Verdi using the Verdi Interoperability Apps (VIA) which gives open access to the Verdi KDB and FSDB databases. She also demonstrates protocol debug made easy using the Protocol Analyzer. This gives… Read More
The Wi-Fi Alliance is an industry consortium dedicated to driving adoption of the various Wi-Fi standards which also go under the rather less catchy name of IEEE 802.11x (where the x varies depending on the generation of the standard, right now a, b, g or n). They also certify devices for interoperability.
Wi-Fi Alliance says that… Read More
About 4 years ago some of my semiconductor cohorts urged me to blog. “Hey Dan, you’re a funny guy, write about EDA and IP, make us laugh!” Of course what I think is funny most people think is snarky, which is a nice word for being a smart ass. The traditional semiconductor press was crumbling, the non traditional EDA websites were outdated,… Read More
Optimizing logical, physical, electrical, and manufacturing effects, Cadence digital implementation technology eliminates iteration without sacrificing design quality by addressing timing sensitivity, yield variation, and leakage power from the start. … Read More
Josefina Hobbs, a solutions architect at Synopsys, demonstrates protocol debug made easy using the Synopsys Protocol Analyzer. This gives users a graphical view of the transfers, transaction, packets and handshaking of a protocol. The video also shows the integration of Synopsys Protocol Analyzer with SpringSoft’s… Read More
