Posts Tagged ‘Synopsys’
Wednesday, July 16th, 2014
Despite its ethereal-sounding name, Silicon Cloud International is a company grounded in the reality of chip design, particularly for an important international demographic, professors and students. Mojy Chian is CEO of the Singapore-based SCI. We spoke recently by phone.
Chian started by defining the cloud. “The concept of the cloud is straightforward. It means remote computing, so if you are not using your local machine, you are using the cloud. There are a lot of applications in the cloud, including eCommerce, Facebook, cloud storage, and remote collaboration based in the cloud.
“Certainly, usage of the cloud has taken off in recent years, but remember there are several different types of clouds. In contrast to private cloud computing, public cloud computing means accessing machines [owned by other companies such as Amazon], where you can actually go and use their machines.”
Our conversation being specific to chip design, I asked Chian to comment on widespread industry concerns regarding security when working in the public cloud. Companies are oft-times reluctant to compute and/or store their designs in the public cloud for fear of losing their precious data to hackers and pirates.
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Tags: Cadence, cloud computing, EDA, GlobalFoundries, Mojy Chian, MOSIS, private cloud, public cloud, Silicon Cloud International, SRC, Synopsys, TSMC
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Thursday, June 5th, 2014
The June breezes were intense in San Francisco this week. The fog was swirling out at the Great Highway, and making itself known across town amidst the flags flying sharply over Moscone Center. The Electronic Design Automation and IP communities were out in force in and around South Hall, while thousands of edgy app developers were playing out their own dramas across the street and down the block in and around West Hall where Apple was holding court at the same time. Fourth and Howard was awash all week in hordes and gaggles of the people who are shaping the future of the world.
Algorithms – Perhaps as never before, algorithms were the number one topic at DAC this year, and in so many different shapes and sizes. Algorithms for high-level synthesis, algorithms for creating models, algorithms for translating physical data into guidelines for design, algorithms for translating assertions into verification metrics for more orderly validations, algorithms for encrypting and decoding, algorithms for compression and decompression, algorithms for converting approximate computational output into exactitude, algorithms for hearing, seeing, and even believing. In San Francisco this week at DAC, it was algorithms all the way down, everywhere you looked.
Adjacencies – The Design Automation Conference is all about ideas, and this year the principle idea was change. The Executive Committee re-shuffled the long-standing deck of cards that’s represented the most important topics at DAC over the last 50 years and came up instead with a whole new set of talking points.
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Tags: Adapt-IP, Cadence, DAC 2014, Design Automation Conference, Lucio Lanza, Mac McNamara, Martin Lund, Mentor Graphics, Navraj Nandra, Soha Hassoun, Synopsys
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Wednesday, May 14th, 2014
There are three reasons you should visit OneSpin at DAC in San Francisco. First, they’re a German company, albeit with a group in California, so it’s great to chat with the German contingent while they’re in town; second, it’s been 10 years since they were spun out of Infineon, so they have that much experience selling verification tools into some of the largest semis in the world; and third, Dave Kelf heads up marketing for the company and any conversation with Dave’s going to leave you better informed and happy to be working in the industry. He’s the ultimate optimist.
I spoke by phone recently with Dave. It was morning in Silicon Valley and late afternoon in the U.K. as he described a new tool recently released by OneSpin that’s useful for evaluating verification coverage.
Dave said, “OneSpin’s been working on this for a while with customers. It was actually a customer who said to us: Look, you’ve got this great coverage engine. Why don’t you release it as a separate tool, because it could be very beneficial.
“So we looked at our coverage engine, added some features, made it useful to a number of different companies, and released it as Quantify. The response has been great. It’s really started to transform the environment for our customers, a group of very high-end companies.”
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Tags: Cadence, Certitude, DAC 2014, Dave Kelf, Infineon, Jasper, Novas, OneSpin, Quantify, SpringSoft, Synopsys
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Thursday, May 1st, 2014
A friend likes to spend hours on Sundays reading the New York Times cover to cover. Pointing to an article from last weekend’s edition, he exclaimed, “This Putin guy is a real piece of work! He’s a total dictator and worse, thinks he can win the world war he’s about to unleash!”
“Stay calm and carry on,” I said soothingly. “It’s a global economy these days and he will succumb to the pressures of maintaining a steady environment for international trade.”
“Yeah?” the friend scoffed. “And you call yourself a student of history? You don’t think there was a global economy in 1939?”
“Look,” I said. “Seriously. The EDA industry is in Moscow. Do you think they’d be playing in an environment that’s spiraling out of control?”
“Yeah?” he retorted. “The world, starting with Putin, doesn’t care about your precious EDA. And besides, who says EDA’s in Moscow?”
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Tags: Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys
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Thursday, April 24th, 2014
Talking to ProPlus Design Solutions requires a long view of history over at least the last 20 years in EDA. In 1993, BTA, an EDA company focused on device model extraction and SPICE simulation, was founded with U.C. Berkeley’s Dr. Chenming Hu as Chairman of the Board. In 1999, BTA merged with Ultima, and became Celestry in 2001.
Finally, in 2003, the combined companies were acquired by Cadence Design Systems. Then in 2007, a new company called ProPlus was spun out of Cadence to support the original BSIMProPlus device modeling platform with roots going back to BTA/Celestry.
Current ProPlus CTO Bruce McGaughy earned his PhD at Cal with Chenming Hu as his advisor, served at both BTA and Celestry, and worked at Cadence, before joining ProPlus 6 years ago. I had a chance to talk with Dr. McGaughy in person last month in Silicon Valley. Our conversation covered a range of topics.
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Tags: Agilent EEsoft, Bruce McGaughy, BSIMProPlus, BTA Technology, Cadence Design Systems, Celestry Design Technology, Chenming Hu, David Patterson, IBM, Mentor Graphics, MunEDA, NanoSpice, Solido, Synopsys, U.C. Berkeley, Ultima, University of Illinois
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Monday, April 21st, 2014
In the moments prior to Cadence’s quarterly earnings call this afternoon, the company released news of the acquisition of Jasper Design Automation for $170 million, less $24 million in cash, and a small tremor rippled out across the EDA Nation.
Paraphrasing Cadence CEO Lip-Bu Tan in the early minutes of his 5pm ET earnings call: We are very pleased to announce a definitive agreement to acquire Jasper Design Automation. This will help us to further meet our customers’ needs for more advanced verification solutions, particularly today as verification now represents 70% of the cost of SoC development. Together, Cadence and Jasper can move forward, offering the strong formal verification solutions leading customers need. In addition, Cadence is also very pleased to be bringing on board the strong team at Jasper, a team with excellent real-world experience.
All good stuff, yes? So why any tremors in our beloved little EDA Nation?
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Tags: Aart de Geus, BDA, Cadence, Coverity, EDAC, formal verification, Forte, Innovation, Jasper Design Automation, Kathryn Kranen, Lip-bu Tan, M&A in EDA, Mentor Graphics, Oasys, Synopsys, Wally Rhines
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Thursday, March 27th, 2014
The last time I had a lengthy conversation with Dr. Andreas Kuehlmann, he was director of Cadence Research Labs, housed in an off-campus office building just across the street from U.C. Berkeley. I spent an hour touring the lab, located on several floors there, with Kuehlmann as my tour guide.
First launched in 1993, by 2007 the Cadence lab was enjoying incredible new facilities when I visited, heavily kitted out with shiny work stations, high-end desks, fancy seating, gleaming conference rooms, and the usual array of tech-toys one expected to be on-site to entertain the young fanciful ones whose creativity apparently relied on having their work stations and their play stations positioned in close proximity
At the time, Mike Fister was King at Cadence. His reign, although now thoroughly besmirched by history, included in the plus column the company’s ongoing funding and encouragement of their Berkeley-based BlueSky TechLab/PlayPen.
During my visit in December 2007, my tour guide explained in great detail how Fister had been there several days before and had again reassured Kuehlmann that he had at his disposal all of Cadence’s resources: Kuehlmann’s job was not to worry about funding, only to worry about the rate at which his feisty group of wunderkinds were turning out innovative ideas that could be embraced by the mainline Cadence organization and brought to market.
Wow, what a gig, I probably said at the time, and Kuehlmann probably agreed: Cool digs just a few quick steps away from Cal’s engineering brain-trust, cool young folks soldiering away all around him, and a way cool corner office for the lab’s director that looked straight out to the Golden Gate Bridge. What wasn’t to like about that set-up?
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Tags: Aart de Geus, Andreas Kuehlmann, Cadence Berkeley Labs, Coverity, EDA360, John Bruggeman, Lip-bu Tan, Mike Fister, Stanford, Synopsys, U.C. Berkeley
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Monday, March 24th, 2014
March 24th, 6:01 AM – Later this morning at Silicon Valley SNUG, the CEO of Synopsys will be presenting a keynote that will most likely dwell on the newest major tool release from his company: IC Compiler II.
Synopsys notified the press several weeks ago that the announcement would be made this morning, but we would only be blessed with a pre-briefing if we promised to honor the embargo. Undoubtedly most agreed to these most conventional of terms. However, either ESNUG was never asked, or simply learned details of the launch through more creative channels; a preliminary description and critique of ICC II were published there last Thursday for all to see.
When I asked Synopsys last Friday morning if the ESNUG post made their embargo invalid, it was clear I had touched a nerve in their organization. They were absolutely adamant that the embargo was still valid, and if I refused to promise to honor it, not only would I not receive my pre-briefing later that day, I would never receive another pre-briefing from Synopsys going forward. Ever.
Okay then, I’ve honored the embargo. I’ve also used the information published on ESNUG last Thursday afternoon to inform my interview with Synopsys last Friday afternoon. Speaking for Synopsys on my March 21st conference call with the company was Sanjay Bali, Director of Product Marketing. Numerous PR people were also on the call. Here’s an abbreviated report on how the interview went.
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Tags: IC Compiler II, Isaac Newton, Place-and-Route, Richard Newton, Synopsys
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Wednesday, March 12th, 2014
In the spirit of full disclosure, Cadence paid for lunch yesterday for the Press Corps attending CDNLive 2014. We had a scrumptious gourmet meal at Tosca in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency before returning to the Santa Clara Convention Center next door to have an hour-long “one-on-one” with Cadence CEO Lip-Bu Tan. In truth, it was actually an hour-long “twenty-on-one” with CEO Tan, because all of the usual suspects EDA Press Corps was in the room throwing softball lobbing questions at Tan.
Over the course of the hour, we learned that CEO Tan has a host of different investment partners – sorry, didn’t write down the names – involved in his various VC-funded ventures that span everything from GoPro [the trendy wearable camera enterprise out of Half Moon Bay] to a fabless startup that he said can tape-out a design at 16 nanometers for a scant $15 million, rather than the usual $150 million being lamented today in the global press. [In fact, Tan mentioned so many ventures he’s involved with, it begs the question: How does he have time to run Cadence?]
We learned that CEO Tan is very excited about all of the technologies involved in the semiconductor design/supply chain, that he believes it’s a great time to be a player in the industry, and that Cadence is innovating rapidly on multiple fronts simultaneously. And if/whenever Tan senses that they’re slowing down in any particular area, he pushes Cadence Engineering to move forward even faster.
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Tags: Aart de Geus, Cadence, CDNLive 2014, Chi-Foon Chan, DVCon, Forte, GoPro, John Cooley, Lip-bu Tan, Mentor Graphics, Netflix, Synopsys, System-level design, Tesla, Wally Rhines
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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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