Congratulations to SoC Solutions and Silvaco! SoC Solutions will soon be under the Silvaco umbrella. (See the news release, “Silvaco to Acquire SoC Solutions.”

As a member of the ESD Alliance, SoC Solutions recently took full advantage of the well-honed expertise of our Export Committee. In fact, as SoC Solutions found, anyone who doubts the value of the ESD Alliance or its Export Committee won’t after learning that the three-person group took on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) and won.

Yes, consider the Export Committee formidable. Made up of representatives from Synopsys, Mentor and Cadence, it was able to persuade BIS to change a small but important piece of the Encryption and Export Administration Regulations. “In our EDA world, we have one main exemption that my committee gained for the industry back in 2005 –– decontrolling our usage of encryption in the design cycle,” says Cadence’s Larry Disenhof, the chair of the Export Committee. Only in the last year has the main body of encryption regulations caught up with our exemption fully decontrolling ancillary encryption used in products from DVD players and household appliances to protection of IP in electronic design, he added. “Without this exemption, we would have been filing license applications constantly for the last 10 years.”
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