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IP Showcase

Archive for March, 2013

SNUG: Lunch with a proper stranger

Thursday, March 28th, 2013

The best part of attending a conference like SNUG is plunging into a room of hundreds of anonymous lunch munchers and striking up a conversation with a stranger. Over the course of the meal, you’ll learn a little bit about somebody’s career, their expertise, and their concerns.

This week’s networking lunch at the Santa Clara Convention Center was no different. I had a chance to converse for 30 minutes with a lunch companion at a table full of strangers. By the end of the meal, I had heard first-hand about a really big problem for small IP vendors attempting to succeed in the current market – they can’t. According to my lunch companion, it’s nigh-on impossible to compete against ARM.

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Tags: ARM, GlobalFoundries, SMIC, SNUG, TSMC, UMC
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ARM & SNPS: implementing big.LITTLE

Thursday, March 21st, 2013

If you thought about going to the Synopsys Users Group meeting next week in Silicon Valley, there’s at least one topic that would make it worth your time: This week ARM and Synopsys announced “optimized 28-nm Synopsys Reference Implementations for ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore and Cortex-A7 MPCore processor clusters, as well as the CoreLink CCI-400 cache-coherent interconnect.”

The reference implementations are currently available, and include “scripts, floorplan, constraints and documentation” – scripts that are built on Synopsys’ tool Reference Methodologies and are optimized for high-performance cores. Clearly attending SNUG would clarify what you need to know to use all of this, but first apparently you need to understand ARM’s big.LITTLE processing. Which is what?

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Tags: ARM, ARM big.LITTLE processing, SNUG, Synopsys, Synopsys Reference Implementations
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M&A: CDNS + Tensilica = win/win

Tuesday, March 12th, 2013

As the trading day in New York draws to a close, it would appear that some analysts are correct; the market’s not too pleased about yesterday’s announcement that Cadence is acquiring Tensilica. Shares of CDNS are trading down well over 3% today. But you know, the market’s stupid. They understand zip zero nada about EDA or IP, and really why should they?

After all, EDA and IP providers make the black magic that they do look so easy. And, they’re constantly telling people that what they do isn’t rocket science. But it is! The EDA vendors make the tools that IP vendors use to create their products, and designers use to integrate said IP into the larger designs. It’s called an eco-system and it is rocket science.

It’s also on the level of brain surgery, quantum physics, and a bunch of other esoteric science and engineering disciplines that require a lot of education and and a lot of OJT, and even then is really hard to do. How many traders on Wall Street, or the analysts who track it all, really understand what EDA and/or IP are all about? Exactly!

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Tags: ARM, Cadence, CDNS, Chris Rowen, EDAC CEO Panel, Lip-Bu Tan, Simon Segars, Synopsys, Tensilica
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