IP Showcase 
Peggy Aycinena
Peggy Aycinena is a freelance journalist and Editor of EDA Confidential at www.aycinena.com. She can be reached at peggy at aycinena dot com. ARM: A Gnawing Sense of UneaseJuly 12th, 2017 by Peggy Aycinena
The UK decided to Brexit the EU on 23 June 2016, and ARM announced it had been sold to Tokyo-based SoftBank three weeks later, on 18 July 2016. For some, these developments would have been unthinkable up to the moment they unfolded, but now they’re both a reality. Article 50 was triggered by the British PM on 29 March 2017, and the UK will no longer be in the EU as of March 2019. ARM is no longer publicly traded, and although it was once the crown jewel of Britain’s technical portfolio, it is now a wholly owned Japanese enterprise. Or at least it was, until 7 March 2017 when SoftBank announced an even more astonishing bit of news. SmartFlow: The Importance of Export ComplianceJune 22nd, 2017 by Peggy Aycinena
I last spoke with Miracco in November 2015 when the company launched, offering tools and strategies to software companies who have lost product to theft and piracy. At the time, Synopsys was dealing with a publicly-acknowledged system breach, so that conversation with SmartFlow was particularly pertinent. This current piece, however, is about export compliance, a topic also of intense interest to the EDA industry. Cadence’s Larry Disenhof is the industry’s subject expert in this area. Having heard him speak numerous times, although the piece below ends with a plug for SmartFlow, Disenhoff would undoubtedly agree with an articulate reminder that export compliance is neither optional nor for the faint of heart. The message is clear: If you’re running a software company, ignore these issues at your own peril. Read the rest of SmartFlow: The Importance of Export Compliance UltraSoC: Addressing their Customer’s CustomerJune 15th, 2017 by Peggy Aycinena
When I spoke this week with company CEO Rupert Baines, he started with Shanghai: “There is so much interest in RISC-V in China. The attendance there [exceeded] the headcount at the previous meetings at Google and MIT, although the numbers may be confusing as there were so many students at the Shanghai event.” Asked if the RISC-V event would be in China again, Baines said, “I believe going forward there will be one conference in the U.S. each year, probably in Silicon Valley, and one international. Nvidia sponsored the latest one through their presence in Shanghai.” Turning to UltraSoC, I asked about the company’s origin, market and competition. Baines said, “We do semiconductor IP that solves a problem. The chips are so big and complicated today, understanding how they work – with lots of processors and lots of software interacting with each other and the real world – is incredibly difficult. Read the rest of UltraSoC: Addressing their Customer’s Customer Aart de Geus: Grand Challenges in IPJune 8th, 2017 by Peggy Aycinena
To say Aart de Geus is synonymous with Synopsys, an organization he’s led for over 30 years, is not an understatement. His entire professional zeitgeist is wrapped up in the company. Neither is it an understatement to say de Geus is always on-message, always on-point. The interview below is no exception. Dr. de Geus’ vision of Grand Challenges in IP is informed by the daily, working realities of the needs of the customers that constitute the IP market, and an IP vendor’s evolving response to those needs. We spoke by phone on June 1st. Grant Pierce: Grand Challenges in IPMay 18th, 2017 by Peggy Aycinena
Asked to enumerate the Grand Challenges in IP he sees today, Pierce began: “Having been in the industry for 20 years myself, I am surprised that we still have some challenges ahead of us. We have new entrants into the industry that are more focused at the system level, however, with customers coming in to interact with the IP guys directly to get their custom designs done. “What I am seeing today, versus 20 years ago, is the emergence of Machine Learning. And that brings with it some technical challenges. On the one hand, they are very familiar – the age-old challenges about bandwidth and throughput – but on the other hand, they are also very new. Today’s applications are driving things together in a totally new way. IP News: Bad outweighs the Good, and your point is?May 4th, 2017 by Peggy Aycinena
Then this week, that same Imagination announced it was selling MIPS – a company it bought back in 2012 with great fanfare for [a mere] $60 million. [It’s true, MIPS’ patent portfolio was worth a lot more.] Also this week, TSMC announced it is charging a former employee with IP theft: The former employee is alleged to have stolen manufacturing data from TSMC specifically related to Nvidia and AMD chip production, taken it across the Straights of Taiwan, and turned it over to his new employer in the PRC, HLMC. Read the rest of IP News: Bad outweighs the Good, and your point is? Celebrating Accellera’s UVM: Now it’s IEEE 1800.2April 27th, 2017 by Peggy Aycinena
The effort has consumed upwards of 10 years, and represents thousands of man-hours of effort, consultation, compromise, consensus building, rinse and repeat. Over and over until the final product was polished, presented and approved by the IEEE. Not an easy process by anybody’s estimation. When we spoke by phone this week about the Accellera announcement, I asked Tom Alsop [Principal Engineer at Intel] how difficult the whole thing had actually been. He chuckled slightly: “For us, it was fairly difficult.” Read the rest of Celebrating Accellera’s UVM: Now it’s IEEE 1800.2 IP for Cars: Lawsuits are like SandstormsApril 20th, 2017 by Peggy Aycinena
Chips in cars today need to manage the power train, or they need to provide safety and security for the driver – but either way, they need to work perfectly every time, all the time, and in some pretty hellish conditions. It’s hot under the hood and the road today is unforgiving. So are the lawyers. So what’s a third-party IP provider supposed to do? Turn tail and run? Never sell into the automotive market where litigation looms larger than a sandstorm in April on the Texas Panhandle? Or try to man-up and work with the automotive market to provide IP that fits well into the chips that such customers need? |
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