By Ed Sperling

The market seems to be picking up on all sides, even if the hiring hasn’t started in earnest yet. After months of depressing news, there are all sorts of deals being made and had, almost all of them with a low power angle even if that’s not prominent in the announcements. These days, low power is a prerequisite.

The FPGA world seems to be getting lots of attention these days. Aside from a slew of prototypes being built in China with FPGAs, the tools for developing FPGAs are are improving. In fact, they look a lot like the tools being used for ASICs and SoCs these days.

Mentor Graphics introduced logic and physical synthesis support for Xilinx’s Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 lines. Cadence and Xilinx also joined forces to add encrypted simulation models of Xilinx IP with complementary simulation models from Cadence. Xilinx, it appears, has been very busy.  And Actel and Synopsys renewed their OEM relationship for design software for Actel’s low-power FPGAs.

Design activity seems to be picking up in China in recent months. Synopsys inked a deal with Shanghai-based foundry SMIC for a 65nm reference flow. Synopsys contributes the Eclypse Low Power technology and Galaxy and SMIC contributes…well…the customer base to use the stuff. What’s interesting is just how quickly SMIC got to 65nm. Last we heard, their volume market was 180nm.

In the processor world, Intel’s purchase of Wind River passed another regulatory hurdle and the company signed a development deal with Nokia. Those are foundational moves. Whether Intel can break into new markets with this strategy is still in question, though. It depends on just how low it can get the power requirements for Atom.

And if anyone has doubts that there is still money in the consumer market, Apple sold 1 million of its new iPhones in the first three days of its launch. That’s a lot of electronics. If Apple begins designing its own chips, that’s going to require a lot of system-level design tools, as well.

Tags: Actel, Apple, Cadence, Intel, Mentor Graphics, Nokia, SMIC, Synopsys

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 10:14 am and is filed under News Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.