Let’s start with some comments, before getting to the news. Renesas’ acquisition of Altium will create a new, arguably unprecedented type of “bundle offer” targeted at system makers, by combining a portfolio of building blocks (chips) with a cloud-based software platform that is expected to reduce the system integration effort to put those blocks together. Will this help Renesas to sell more chips? Will this help Altium to sell more licenses? An obvious observation is that a system usually requires chips from a number of different vendors, so it’s not clear how a “privileged” relationship between a PCB design tool and just one specific chip vendor could benefit users. Unless the combined offering aims at making design system easier and more efficient for any choice of chips, including the ones that compete against Renesas products. But if this the case, it’s not clear how this could benefit Renesas. As for the impact of this acquisition on the EDA industry, it could be noted that Japan-headquartered Renesas is now directly competing against another Japanese company – Zuken – in the area of PCB design tools.
Another interesting news concerns Nvidia, reportedly building a new business unit to design bespoke chips for customers such as the hyperscalers. Waiting for more details, it can be observed that the hyperscalers internally developing their own AI chips seem to have made this decision also to gain independence from Nvidia, not just because they want tailor-made chips. In addition to that, one could ask if a new offering of bespoke GPUs could contribute to solving the GPU shortage – given the current global foundry capacity. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who is on a mission to raise money to build new fabs, clearly thinks that the bottleneck is insufficient foundry capacity. And now, let’s move to the news.
