The EDA industry is in good shape: according to a report from Reportlinker, the Electronic Design Automation market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.0% over the next eight years, reaching US$28.27 billion by 2027. Recent industry news include TSMC granting certifications for its System-on-Integrated-Chips stacking technology (TSMC-SoIC) to Ansys, Cadence, Mentor and Synopsys.
Microsoft and Intel acquiring specialized companies
IoT and AI are the two drivers behind the recent acquisitions from Microsoft and Intel respectively. The software giant has acquired Express Logic, a leader in real time operating systems (RTOS) for IoT and edge devices powered by microcontrollers. Express Logic’s ThreadX RTOS has over 6.2 billion deployments, making it one of the most deployed RTOS in the world. With this acquisition, Microsoft aims to grow the number of devices connected to its cloud computing service Azure and will enable new intelligent capabilities. Microsoft’s goal is to make Express Logic’s ThreadX RTOS available as an option for real time processing requirements on an Azure Sphere device and enable ThreadX-powered devices to connect to Azure IoT Edge devices when the IoT solution calls for edge computing capabilities.
Intel has acquired Omnitek, a UK-based provider of video and vision FPGA IP solutions. Omnitek’s technology is clearly a complement to Intel’s FPGA business: last week, for example, Omnitek announced availability of a new Convolutional Neural Network optimized for the Intel Arria 10 GX architecture, claiming world-leading performance per watt (135 GOPS/W) at full 32-bit floating point accuracy. The design employs a new framework combining fixed point and floating point maths.
