Posts Tagged ‘EDA Consortium’
Thursday, November 9th, 2017
Simon Segars has been CEO of UK-based ARM Holdings since 2013. When he first joined the company in 1991, he was employee No. 16, and was there when the company went public in 1998.
Last year, Japan-based SoftBank purchased ARM for $32 billion, just a few days after the Brexit vote, and took the company private. This year, SoftBank sold 25-percent of ARM to Saudi Arabia, in a deal that was part of the company’s (and kingdom’s) Vision Fund juggernaut.
Simon Segars has more than survived all of this change. He is still CEO of the most ubiquitous IP provider in the world, and now also has a seat on the Board of Directors of SoftBank.
As I prepared for my phone call with Segars last week, I was pretty sure he would decline to answer the bulk of the questions on my list. Surprisingly, however, he answered all of them, with ease and on the record. We started with the most astonishing news of all: ARM has changed its name.
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Tags: Advanced RISC Machines, ARM Holdings, ARM TechCon, Bob Gardner, EDA Consortium, ESD Alliance, Masayoshi Son, RISC-V, Saudi Arabia, Simon Segars, SoftBank, SoftBank Vision Fund
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Thursday, October 19th, 2017
The Electronic System Design Alliance began life as the EDA Consortium over 25 years ago. Early last year, EDAC morphed into the ESD Alliance thanks to the efforts of many, not the least being ESD Alliance Executive Director Bob Smith, now in his third year serving in that role.
As currently I am mid-way through the process of speaking to the leadership of all of the member companies in the ESD Alliance, it was good to talk recently with Smith and discuss his vision for the future of the organization. His enthusiasm mirrors that of the many companies I have spoken with so far.
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Tags: ACM/SIGDA, Bob Smith, CELUG, Design Automation Conference, EDA Consortium, ESD Alliance, Flexera, Graham Bell, IEEE-CEDA, Jim Hogan, Julie Rogers, Larry Disenhof, License Management & Anti Piracy, Nanette Collins, Paul Cohen, San Jose State University, Sashi Subramanian, Sharon Hu, Stephanie Chou, Steve Pollock
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Thursday, February 9th, 2017
This week, the ESD Alliance announced that Sonics CEO Grant Pierce has been elected chair of the organization’s Board of Directors. His election is unique in several ways: Pierce is the first CEO of an IP company to lead the Alliance; he replaces two co-chairs, Cadence CEO Lip-Bu Tan and PDF Solutions, John Kibarian; and he is only the second CEO of a non-publicly traded company to serve as Board Chair, the other being Jasper CEO Kathryn Kranen who took the reins in 2012.
When Pierce and I spoke by phone on Tuesday about his election, he noted the unique circumstances of his new leadership role: “When I joined the board several years ago, it was with the intention to add a new point of view to what was then the EDA Consortium, to help the organization reflect the emerging reality of what was happening in the marketplace with respect to IP companies.
“In some ways, the IP companies consider themselves to be a necessary evil. Every chip developed today involves some sort of third-party IP, so having a place on the Board of the ESD Alliance is essential.”
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Tags: Aart de Geus, Amit Gupta, ARM, Bob Smith, Cadence, Cadence Design Systems, Dean Drako, EDA Consortium, EDAC, ESD Alliance, ESDA, IC Manage, John Kibarian, Lanza techVentures, Lip-Bu Tan, Lucio Lanza, Mentor Graphics, PDF Solutions, Simon Segars, Solido Design Automation, Sonics, Synopsys, Wally Rhines
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Wednesday, March 9th, 2016
EDAC has decided to change its name. At last. What the new name will be, most do not know, but you can find out over some food and a glass of wine or beer on Wednesday evening, March 30th, at the Consortium’s headquarters on Zanker Road in San Jose.
Lots of people have been pointing out for a long time that membership in the EDA Consortium includes some of the biggest names in IP, not to mention embedded software, so not reflecting that reality in the organization’s name is pretty nonsensical. In fact, two recent blogs here on EDACafe specifically address the issue.
The first one is titled: “Answer’s nope: Should EDA Consortium become IP Consortium?” [September 30, 2015].
In this blog, I asked Mentor Graphics CEO Wally Rhines: “Aren’t the IP companies on the verge of overshadowing the size and impact of the EDA companies in the EDA Consortium. So much so, it seems like it’s time to change the name to the IP Consortium.”
Rhines responded, “It will never be the case that it’s all EDA or all IP. In fact, IP revenue is only one-third the size of the market tracked by MSS today. The other two-thirds is traditional EDA.
“Even ARM — although their market cap is $20 billion — their revenue is just about the same as Mentor’s. The EDA industry is a long way from being dominated by the IP industry, plus we’re in a very prosperous period in EDA. We’ve got 22 nanometers, 14, 10, 7 all working at the same time, so we’re meeting customer demands at all of these nodes.”
Last September, Dr. Rhines appeared distinctly underwhelmed by the argument that it’s time to change the Consortium’s name.
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Tags: EDA Consortium, EDAC, Simon Davidmann, Wally Rhines
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Wednesday, November 18th, 2015
This week Synopsys announced “unauthorized third-party access to Synopsys EDA, IP and optical products and product license files through its customer-facing license and product delivery system. The unauthorized access, which began in July 2015, was discovered by Synopsys in October 2015.”
The fact that the company needs to make this announcement is indicative of a new attitude towards an old problem: Software companies who lose their products to theft and piracy no longer want to just buck up and get past it, particularly in EDA. Instead, they want tools and strategies to go after their adversaries. The newly launched startup SmartFlow Compliance Solutions, just announced last week, is planning to offer such tools.
Launched by Ted Miracco – one of the founders of EDA vendor AWR Corp. – SmartFlow is based on his experience dealing with pirated AWR product software, including tracking down and forcing restitution from companies who were proven culpable. In a phone call last week discussing his new company, Miracco said pirated software is more than just an occasional nuisance, it’s resulting in billions of dollars in lost revenue to the companies whose products are being used without licenses.
More profound than lost profits, however, is the ’tilting’ of the playing field. When companies who use pirated software to design chips or systems are able to undercut their competition by underpaying for the tools they need, or by not paying at all, the competition is hobbled.
In response, SmartFlow has engineered a complex set of tools and protocols that will allow companies to unearth pirated instantiations of their software across a variety of customer profiles. To begin their effort to build those tools, Miracco and his team looked closely at software non-compliance around the globe, parsed the different types of pirates and examined their principal strategies.
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Tags: AWR Corp., Cadence, Chris Luijten, EDA Consortium, Flexera, ITCA, L:ucent, Mentor Graphics, Mercedes Benz, Microsoft, Motorola, National Instruments, Nortel, SafeNet, SmartFlow Compliance Solutions, Software Piracy, Synopsys, Ted Miracco
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Wednesday, September 30th, 2015
The news is good out of EDA this week: The industry continues up and to the right.
EDAC’s Market Statistic Services produced the numbers: “The EDA industry revenue increased 8.5 percent for Q2 2015 to $1906.5 million, compared to $1757.9 million in Q2 2014. The four-quarters moving average, which compares the most recent four quarters to the prior four quarters, also increased by 8.5 percent. Companies that were tracked employed a record 32,806 professionals in Q2 2015, an increase of 4.9 percent compared to the 31,259 people employed in Q2 2014, and up 2.1 percent compared to Q1 2015.”
Mentor CEO Walden C. Rhines provided the commentary: “The industry’s strong, and exceptionally good in CAE, where the concentration is emulation, functional verification, and test, [while] IC physical design also reported solid growth. Geographically, all regions except Japan saw revenue increases, especially Asia/Pacific. The PacRim was strong in Q2, North America was strong, and Europe was pure gold.”
“The numbers are also very good in IP,” he continued, “especially in EDA combined with IP. The external companies, dominated by ARM, showed unusually large growth in Q2, and the internal IP companies are also showing excellent growth.”
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Tags: ARM, EDA Consortium, Mentor Graphics, MSS, Wally Rhines
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Wednesday, September 9th, 2015
ARM must be doing something right when among the eight corporate sponsors for their upcoming Silicon Valley users conference in November, the top three companies in EDA are listed as Diamond or Platinum.
Cadence is Diamond, undoubtedly, because company President & CEO Lip-Bu Tan is co-chair of EDAC, and ARM CEO Simon Segars is on the EDAC Board. But why would Mentor and Synposys spend good money being Platinum sponsors of ARM’s show when they could put that particular chunk of disposable income into their own user conferences, or even DAC? Particularly since Mentor and Synopsys sell IP, as does Cadence, so in some ways the three EDA companies may actually be competing with ARM.
There are three possible answers: A) Mentor, Synopsys, and Cadence serve as channels for ARM products. B) Mentor, Synopsys, and Cadence want to see, and be seen by, ARM’s enormous worldwide customer base. C) ARM has the winning hand in today’s semiconductor supply chain, so either the Big Three in EDA pony up to help sponsor ARM TechCon, or the UK-based IP behemoth won’t cooperate in the EDA world; they won’t offer pointers or tool-development advice for the third-party design software that EDA vendors sell and ARM customers [might] buy.
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Tags: ARM, ARM TechCon 2015, Cadence, EDA Consortium, Jane Austin, Lip-Bu Tan, Mentor Graphics, Pride and Prejudice, Simon Segars, Synopsys
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Wednesday, January 15th, 2014
It’s clear that these are heady days in EDA and IP. The numbers have been up and to the right for a number of quarters now and everybody’s feeling good about things, including Mentor Graphics CEO Wally Rhines. He was doing the rounds last week talking up EDAC’s Market Statistics Service report on the industry for Q3_2013; the report was published this week on Tuesday.
On my phone call with Rhines I found him exuberant, so I started with a comment to which Rhines was not allowed to respond; he was speaking for EDAC in that conversation and not for his own organization. “Wow,” I said. “Mentor is really doing stupendously if your stock valuations are any indication, up over 40 percent in the last year.”
Rhines said nothing, but did chuckle, so I continued: “Wow again, then, for the overall EDA and IP industries. Having said that, I’ve noticed – perhaps not for the first time – that Synopsys does not officially submit numbers for these quarterly MSS updates. What’s up with that?”
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Tags: ARM, Cadence, EDA Consortium, EDAC, Mentor Graphics, MSS, Synopsys, Wally Rhines
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