Posts Tagged ‘ARM’
Thursday, January 7th, 2016
If you’re interested in the past, the third quarter of 2015 is a good place to start: the EDA/IP industries did very well from July through September last year. EDAC’s Market Statistics Service numbers, released this week, offer some of the details. Here’s the link if you want to delve in.
Easier however, is this brief summary of my January 5th phone call with Mentor’s perpetually optimistic CEO Wally Rhines, last year’s EDAC/CEDA Kaufman Award winner and this year’s EDAC spokesman [technically, every year’s].
Although there was snow and ice on the roads around Wilsonville, Oregon, when we talked, nothing could put a damper on Rhines’ sunny outlook for the industry he leads: “The third quarter last year was another great quarter for the EDA and IP industries. With 7.1 percent growth, it was really good and even stronger than usual.
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Tags: Ansys, ARM, Cadence, EDAC, Market Statistics Service, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, Wally Rhines
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Thursday, November 5th, 2015
Since initiating their Decoding Formal Club in October 2013, Oski Technology has hosted this much-needed get-together every quarter, most recently on October 21st of this year at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I was fortunate to attend the debut meeting in 2013, so it was interesting to hear from Oski VP Jin Zhang that the support group is proving valuable to the growing numbers who attend.
“The first time we held the meeting,” Zhang said, “it was by invitation only, and we included about a dozen folks. Since that first event, we have continued to use the same room at the Computer History Museum, a room that can hold up to 40 people.
“The workshop, however, is continuing to grow very nicely, so we are faced with either finding a new venue or working with the museum to arrange for a bigger room for our next meeting in the first quarter of 2016.”
Zhang said interest in the event has increased to the point that people sign up to attend as soon as the date and time are announced. “They want to be sure they’ve got a spot,” she said.
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Tags: Apple, ARM, Broadcom, Cadence, Decoding Formal Club, formal verification, Google, Intel, Jin Zhang, Mentor Graphics, NVIDIA, Oski Technology, Synopsys
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Thursday, October 15th, 2015
Imperas Founder & CEO Simon Davidmann has been thinking about the EDA industry for a while, and the consortium that represents it. And like a lot of observers, he thinks change is in the air. In previous blogs, I myself have predicted that EDAC will evolve to offer better representation to IP providers, but Davidmann believes changes in the consortium will be even more dramatic.
“When EDAC was started,” Davidmann said in a recent phone call, “it was about CAD tools. But design automation has evolved from schematic layout and simulation to a point where everything is focused on really big designs. Yes, IP is a fundamental part of that evolution and companies like Synopsys have made a lot of investment in IP, so EDAC has no problem including IP in its landscape.
“But real problems today and tomorrow are about dealing with large systems on chips. Something that is moving the focus in the industry to software. Chip design is no longer just about design tools and IP, it’s about systems, and the software that runs on those platforms.
“As a consortium designed to help companies in the design automation business, therefore, EDAC has to look at not just design tools and IP. It also has to look at systems and software. An emerging technology, quickly moving into the mainstream, is virtual platforms for software development. Of course, Synopsys is investing in virtual platforms – an indication of the importance of such things in the design process.
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Tags: ARM, Cadence, Coverity, EDA Consortium, EDAC, Imagination Technologies, Imperas, inSilicon, Mentor Graphics, Simon Davidmann, Synopsys
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Thursday, July 17th, 2014
Once again EDAC’s Market Statistics Service has released quarterly results for the EDA and IP industries, and once again Mentor Graphics CEO Wally Rhines has taken time to debrief the press on the numbers. When we spoke by phone on July 15th, Rhines started with a qualitative eval of the financial situation in Q1_2014, and moved from there to answer several longer-range questions about autos and today’s troubled world.
“The first quarter of 2014 was good for the industry, but not great,” he said. “With overall growth of 4.6 percent, year over year, it was a good quarter with the highlight being logic design was up a solid 6.6 percent. Other than that, there was not a lot else [remarkable in EDA].”
“Steady, but not glamorous, for Q1?” I asked.
Rhines said, “Yes, steady as she goes in EDA. The IP business, however, was up strongly in Q1, driven up by results from the non-reporting companies, not members of EDAC. We collect public info from non-reporting IP companies such as ARM, Imagination Technologies, MIPS, Rambus [and Synopsys], and we can see overall that the IP business [exhibited] 10-percent growth, quarter over quarter, Q1_2013 to Q1_2014.”
He added, “The bigger trend [visible in] the current MSS report is that all of the world is showing strong [sales], except Japan which is very weak, down 19 percent in contrast to Asia Pacific, which is up 13.5 percent.
“You should also note that North America and Europe are quite strong, up 7 percent or more. Japan is well below those regions as well. Japan used to be a big part of the total [numbers for the industry], substantially larger than the Asia Pacific Region, but now the Pac Rim is twice the size of the Japanese market.”
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Tags: ARM, Cadence, DAC, EDAC, Egypt, El Salvador, Ford, Imagination Technologies, Infineon, Israel, James Buczkowski, MathWorks, Mentor Graphics, Microsoft, MIPS, MSS, Nokia, NXP, Pakistan, Rambus, Renesas Electronics, Synopsys, TI, Wally Rhines
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Thursday, May 29th, 2014
Like a phoenix rising from too-early reports of a reduced participation in life, the legendary Gary Smith has created a schedule of appearances at the 51st Design Automation Conference in San Francisco that would fell a man half his age. Every time you turn around at Moscone Center next week, or the Intercontinental Hotel before that, you’ll be face-to-face with events featuring the Guru Extraordinaire of EDA.
Sunday evening from 5:00 pm to 5:30 pm, Gary will yet again ring the opening bell at DAC, this year in Ballroom A of the Intercontinental Hotel across the street from Moscone. I’m putting good money on a bet that Gary will be on stage there in his best Tropical Whites, accompanied by slides, predictions, and previews of the Next Epoch in EDA and his Pavilion Panel the next day.
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Tags: 51st Design Automation Conference, Amit Gupta, Anirudh Devgan, ARM, Atrenta, Barnard Murphy, Bob Gardner, Cadence, CLK Design Automation, DAC, DAC 2014, Dead Drako, DeepChip, EDAC, Frank Schirrmeister, Gary Smith, Gloria Nichols, IC Manage, Isadore Katz, Jim Hogan, Joe Sawicki, John Cooley, Lori Kate Smith, Mentor Graphics, Moscone Center, Prince of Wales, Randy Smith, San Francisco Intercontinental Hotel, Solido Design Automation, Sonics, Vista Ventures
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Thursday, March 6th, 2014
Oh my gosh: If you arrived at DVCon 2014 at 10:45 am on Tuesday this week, you’d have wondered if you’d wandered into the wrong conference. What happened to sedate, dignified DVCon? Standing at the registration desk on the first floor of the DoubleTree Hotel in San Jose, the volume of noise and conviviality sweeping down the staircase from the upstairs mezzanine was unprecedented. What was going on up there? The DVCon morning poster session, awash in company reps and their ideas, and engineers anxious to engage with both.
When I got to the top of the staircase, I took a moment before plunging into the crowd, amazed at the vitality and the numbers of people hobnobbing among the posters. It wasn’t surprising to learn later in the day from DVCon General Chair Stan Krolikoski that over a thousand people – attendees and exhibitors combined – were at this year’s conference. Clearly, DVCon is enjoying an extraordinary renaissance, so much so that DVCon Europe will be debuting this October in Munich, with DVCon India, DVCon China, and DVCon Japan now in the planning stages. Like I said, omg.
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Tags: Andreas Meyer, ARM, DVCon 2014, DVCon Europe, formal verification, Jim Hogan, Mentor Graphics, Oracle Labs, Ram Narayan, Rich Edelman, Stan Krolikoski, TI, Vaibhar Mahimkar
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Thursday, February 20th, 2014
These are good days for virtual prototyping vendor, UK-based Imperas. The company will be making appearances this coming week at Embedded World in Nuremberg, at DVCon in San Jose the following week, and at CDNLive in Santa Clara the week after that, as well as several events in the UK in this same time frame. Imperas has a lot to talk about, including an announcement involving MIPS, a division of Imagination Technologies.
Per CEO Simon Davidmann in a recent phone call: “We’re small, self-funded and growing, with revenues last year up 65 percent. [Even better], the type of customers we’re seeing are tier-one semiconductor and embedded systems companies. We want to help people build better software. No one builds a chip without simulation, and we believe software development should be done like that as well.”
I asked about the competition. Simon answered, “It’s true, other people have models in the same space as ours – companies like Synopsys, Cadence and ARM – but we tend to cooperate with them. Our real competition is legacy breadboards, and kick-it-and-see techniques, rather than proper methodologies.
“For most complex SoCs, many people try to develop software with simulation at the RTL level, or with a hardware-accelerator box, but those approaches don’t get the throughput of software and performance they need. And with a prototype, they don’t get the controllability and observability. That’s why most of our competition is the legacy mindset in the customers.”
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Tags: ARM, Cadence, Imagination Technologies, Imperas, MIPS, Simon Davidmann, Synopsys, Tony King-Smith
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Thursday, October 31st, 2013
[Editor’s Note: An abbreviated version of this article first appeared on-line on in July 2001, and again in May 2004 when Gary Smith was engaged to be married to Verisity’s Lori Kate Calise.]
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Starting and ending with the Tao is pretty enigmatic stuff when, in the middle of the stream, you find a bass-toting, black-leather-clad blues musician fresh out of the Naval Academy living in a shack in the midst of Silicon Valley. That pretty much summarizes Gary Smith for those who know him. For those who don’t, to quote from an introduction to Gary I heard at a panel last year where he was acting as moderator: “If anyone in this room doesn’t know who Gary Smith is, they don’t belong in this room.”
For a number of years, Gary Smith has been the single most important prognosticator in EDA. The industry listens to Gary, at DAC and a thousand other venues over the course of the year. They bank on his annual numbers reporting on the health of the industry. They pin his EDA Landscape poster up on the wall to keep track of which companies are which in the here today/acquired tomorrow world of EDA. They take their business plans and nascent product ideas to him and hope for his blessings. They quote him. They court him. They keep him busy, and apparently he loves it – taking all of the adulation in stride with a smile and a nod, which is what you would expect from a guy who takes Eastern philosophies seriously and incorporates them into his mindset and lifestyle.
The rest of Gary’s story is as follows. However, if you believe as Gary does that less is more, you needn’t read on. Based on what you’ve read, you already know him.
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Tags: ARM, Avanti, Cadence, DAC, Daisy-Mentor-Valid, Dataquest, EDA, ES2, Fairchild, Full Disclosures, Gary Smith, GarySmithonEDA, IMI, Lori Kate Smith, LSI, Magma, Mentor Graphics, Monterey, National Electric, Plessy, Sequence, Signetics, Synopsys, Tao, Telmos, TI, U.S. Naval Academy
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Thursday, September 26th, 2013
A Professor, a Sage, and a Guru walked into a bar. Brian the Bartender, greeted them: “What’ll it be, boys?”
The Professor said, “We need some help, Brian, settling an argument.”
“No problema,” Brian the Bartender said. “I’ve got an answer for everything.”
“Well,” the Professor said, “I think ESL’s not going to happen in our lifetime, but the Guru here says it’s just around the corner now that he and his have finally got all the pieces of the flow in place.”
Brian the Bartender laughed, “Yeah, the Guru’s been saying that since the dawn of mankind!”
“Exactly,” the Professor said.
Again Brian the Bartender laughed, “Guru, can you defend yourself? And don’t even think about plunking your wordy White Paper down on the bar. This is a public house, not a public library.”
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Tags: Apache, ARM, Atrenta, Cadence, Cadence System-to-Silicon Verification Summit, Calypto, DOCEA, Duolog, ESL, Forte, Green Hills, Imperas, Intel, Jasper, MathWorks, Mentor Graphics, NVIDIA, Oasys, OneSpin, Real Intent, Synopsys, Verification, Wind River
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Wednesday, August 7th, 2013
Well, it looks like the industry has done it again, delivering good growth over a recent quarter. The Press Release issued by EDAC’s Market Statistics Service on August 6th detailed the numbers for Q1_2013: 8.1% growth overall, including 23.8% growth in Services, 20.2% growth in IP, and (a bit less glam) 2.4% growth in EDA. Interesting.
Meanwhile, Dr. Wally Rhines continues to contribute to the industry by making himself available for conversation about the MSS numbers as they are released each period, clarifying as always that his comments are on behalf of EDAC and do not reflect his role as CEO of Mentor Graphics. When I spoke by phone with Rhines earlier this week, I asked him if we can anticipate industry results for all of 2013 by looking at the Q1 numbers.
He said no, EDAC numbers do not portend the future, they only aggregate the results from the past. To know more about the future of the industry, Rhines referred me to the four visionary keynotes given at DAC by Synopsys’ Aart de Geus, Cadence’s Lip-Bu Tan, Jasper’s Kathryn Kranen and Rhines’ own talk.
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Tags: Aart de Geus, ARM, Cadence, DAC 2013, EDAC, Jasper Design Automation, Kathryn Kranen, Lip-bu Tan, Mentor Graphics, MSS, Synopsys, Wally Rhines
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