Posts Tagged ‘Silvaco’
Thursday, December 7th, 2017
This week on Thursday, December 14th, the second annual edition of REUSE 2017 will unfold in Silicon Valley. It’s a gathering crafted specifically for the vendors of IP blocks, and now whole sub-systems, those pieces of the puzzle which allow the vendors’ customers to design and produce electronic products more efficiently and with better results.
It goes without saying that IP is a pivotal part of the semiconductor supply chain today. Organizations like Arm and Synopsys reap huge benefits from being among the principal suppliers of that IP. But there are hundreds of IP companies in the world – big, medium, and small – that also provide IP.
Potentially, they could all be participating in something like Reuse 2017. Arm, for instance, is participating in the conference, along with dozens of smaller companies. Synopsys, however, is not.
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Tags: Achronix, Aldec, Andes Technology, Aphion, Archband, ARM, Avery Design Systems, CAST, Certus Semiconductor, ChipEstimate.com, City Semiconductor, Corigine, DAC, eFabless, FlexLogix, Intel, Intrinsic ID, IP-SoC, Menta, Mixel, Mobile Semiconductor, Mobiveil, Moortec, NSCore, NVM Engines, OmniDesign, Open-Silicon, QuickLogic, Reuse 2017, RISC-V, Samsung, Semi IP Systems, SiFive, Silicon Creations, Silvaco, Sintegra, SmartFlow, Sofics, Sonics, Surecore, Synopsys, True Circuits, Uniquify No Comments »
Thursday, June 1st, 2017
This is the third in a four-part series showcasing Grand Challenges in IP. The first two conversations were with Sonics CEO Grant Pierce, and CAST Board Chair Hal Barbour.
This week’s dialog is with Warren Savage, founder and CEO of IPextreme. The company was purchased by Silvaco in 2016, where Savage now serves as GM of the IP division.
Warren Savage has been an energetic leader in the IP community, working to get companies in the industry to link arms, address common concerns, and give greater visibility to the importance of their products in the global semiconductor supply chain.
When we spoke on May 24th, Savage began by addressing my question about protection for IP blocks as they move down the manufacturing chain
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Tags: CAST IP, Grant Pierce, Hal Barbour, IPextreme, Moore's Law, Silvaco, Sonics, Warren Savage No Comments »
Thursday, September 15th, 2016
Synopsys has a problem. Per Norm Kelly, speaking at the ESD Alliance panel on September 14th in Silicon Valley, Synopsys loses fully a third of the revenue they’re owed each year for their vast catalog of IP because it’s stolen by Cheaters and used without paying any licensing or royalty fees.
Kelly said Synopsys earns about $200 million per year selling IP, and loses another $100 million to theft. Cheaters are a real problem, he lamented, and as Director of License Compliance for Synopsys he should know. Kelly did not have the floor to share these laments, however, until Warren Savage, GM of IP at Silvaco, opened the meeting.
Speaking from the podium as moderator of the evening’s discussion, Savage said the real problem is the bumblers, those designers and companies who lose track of licensing obligations for IP that was either purchased some time ago, or was brought into the design effort on a data stick fished out of the pocket of someone who’s joined the organization through a poorly managed M&A.
In other words, when Chuckles the Clown uses IP, often as not he doesn’t realize some monies are owed to the third-party IP vendor who created it in the first place. Savage offered this statistic: On an average SoC today, there are 150 to 200 blocks of IP, but only a small percentage of those blocks are actually paid for.
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Tags: Accellera, CAST, Certus, Eric Stein, ESD Alliance, IP fingerprinting, KPMG, PwC, Rob Ballow, Silicon Creations, Silvaco, SoC Solutiosn, Synopsys, The Core Store, True Circuits, Warren Savage No Comments »
Thursday, September 8th, 2016
Over the last several weeks, the ESD Alliance has announced two more members, news of particular interest because both companies are IP vendors. C-Sky Microsystems provides 32-bit embedded CPU cores, and Silvaco provides EDA tools for development of analog/mixed-signal devices, power IC and memory design.
True, Silvaco doesn’t sound like an IP vendor until you remember that it just acquired IPextreme, a well-known player in the IP market headed up by Warren Savage. And Savage, now GM of Silvaco’s IP Division, has recently been named chair of the ESD Alliance Semiconductor IP Working Group, tasked with developing a common methodology, best practices for fingerprinting, and solutions for tracking and auditing IP.
Meanwhile, C-Sky Microsystems brings its own unique value proposition to ESD Alliance. Described in the Press Release as “the first IP company from China to join the ESD Alliance,” C-Sky says it intends to actively participate in Savages’ SIP Working Group. This second bit is admirable, but the first could prove complicated.
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Tags: C-Sky Microsystems, Common Platform, ESD Alliance, ESD Alliance Semiconductor IP Working Group, Silvaco, Warren Savage No Comments »
Thursday, August 11th, 2016
It’s fantastic to see that the ESD Alliance is following through with its new-found commitment to promote discussion about the IP industry. On Wednesday, September 14th, the Alliance is hosting an evening panel at their headquarters in Santa Clara to discuss semiconductor IP issues that “Keep You Awake at Night”.
As background, consider that the massive amounts of IP involved in building a modern SoC may translate into IP vendors losing millions of dollars if their IP is used therein without proper licensing. At the same time, semiconductor companies also wrestle with troubling issues if their engineers accidentally reuse a core without proper licensing, possibly exposing their employers to huge liabilities. The ESD Alliance event in September promises to address these thorny problems.
Moderated by industry leader Warren Savage – formerly CEO of IPextreme, but now GM of IP at Silvaco with the acquisition announced just prior to DAC – the evening’s two panelists come from interesting backgrounds.
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Tags: Eric Stein, ESD Alliance, IPextreme, KPMG, PwC, Rob Ballow, Silvaco, Warren Savage No Comments »
Thursday, July 14th, 2016
Long-time EDA investor Lucio Lanza lead a fascinating, albeit mystifying, discussion in the DAC Pavilion on Monday, July 6th, in Austin. His panelists included IPextreme’s Warren Savage, Scientific Ventures’ Mark Templeton, and eFabless’ Michael Wishart, with the topic under discussion being open source.
The session was titled “Daring to Move to Open Source” and was described thusly: “The emerging Internet of Things market is destined to upend that time-tested ‘advanced-node’ model, as developers opt for older, less costly process technologies, using commodity design tools and selecting proven IP blocks to quickly and efficiently assemble chips. As demand for IoT devices grows exponentially, might open source EDA tools and IP become viable, or even the winning combination that enables the low-cost design of an IoT SoC?”
Here are some soundbites from the panelists.
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Tags: DAC, Dare to Move to Open Source, eFabless, IPextreme, Lucio Lanza, Mark Templeton, Michael Wishart, Open Source, Scientific Ventures, Silvaco, Warren Savage 1 Comment »
Monday, July 28th, 2014
There are three kinds of written word in the world today: books, newspapers/magazines, and all of the rest of it which now lives on the shifting sands of an ever-evolving electronic substrate. Even today, however, even as those ‘effervescent electrons’ garner more and more readers, it’s books-on-paper that continue to hold the most caché, the most gravitas-laden sense of permanence, and the most awe-inspring-for-the-ages kind of wow factor: Really? You wrote a book? Wow!
Hence, when a 220-page book-on-paper called Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry was made available to the EDA community at the 51st annual Design Automation Conference this past month in San Francisco, it was worth noting for several reasons: For the gravitas of the offering; For the permanence of the tome; And for the price, which thanks to eSilicon Corp. was free to all for the taking.
Written by SemiWiki.com gurus Daniel Nenni and Paul McLellan, this Fabulous Fabless book-on-paper was handed out during a buzzy networking event on the spacious East Side of Moscone Center early one evening during the week of DAC in June. At that noisy, ebullient reception, the libations were flowing liberally and so was the printed word.
Anyone milling about in the crowd quickly became the proud owner of Nenni/McLellan’s cheery, well-written history of the world – that special world consisting of everything termed “technology” since 1947 – and could even get signed copies, if they were able to elbow their way across the room to where the authors were perched side-by-side at a table with the express purpose of applying ink-to-paper on the front piece of their book.
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Tags: Altera, AMD, Apple, ARM, Arteris, Atrenta, C&T, Cadence, Calypto, CEVA, Chartered, Cliosoft, Coventer, Daniel Nenni, Docea, eSilicon, Fabless Semiconductor, GlobalFoundries, GSA, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Jasper, Mentor, Paul McLellan, SemiWiki.com, Sidense, Silvaco, Solido, Sonics, Synopsys, Tanner, TSMC, UMC, VLSI Technology, Xilinx No Comments »
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