The economy is still sputtering along, but at least in the United States it appears that we’ve hit bottom. While we haven’t exactly climbed out of a hole, at least we’re not still falling. The overall market remains relatively stable and is poised for recovery, starting now, according to market researcher IC Insights.

China seems to be recovering at the same or faster pace. Chip companies there still aren’t making much money, but they’re certainly not cutting back on new designs. Why else would China’s SMIC be bragging about its new 45nm process technology?

And in Europe, trying to make a broad statement about what’s working is impossible. Infineon sold off its wireline communications business to a group of investors from Golden Gate Capital for $347 million to soften the blow from refinancing its debt. Infineon is getting hammered by auto sales drops the same way some semi companies got hammered when the bottom fell out of the communications market in 2001. At the same time, STMicroelectronics continues rolling out a slew of interesting products, like a chip that improves sound quality in MP3 players, and ARM continues to win deals for new designs, like 2D graphics rendering in new Samsung phones.

And on a global basis—this is, after all a global industry—semiconductor manufacturing continues to rise.TSMC reported that its sales grew 5.3% in June compared with the previous month. While that’s still down 9.6% from last year, growth is returning to the overall industry. Put in perspective, for the first half of the year, sales were down 35.9% compared with 2008, meaning the gap is closing.

All of this is happening at a time when getting new designs out the door is increasingly complex. That’s good news for the makers of EDA, and particularly ESL tools. ST adopted Synopsys’ MVSIM low-power verification solution for its SoC platform for the mobile phone market.

And Mentor Graphics rolled out a hardware-assisted tool to speed up verification in serial-ATA II, the mainstay of consumer storage devices. Both of these are huge, high-volume markets. And in the mixed-signal world, Fujitsu adopted Cadence’s Virtuoso verification technology.

Magma, meanwhile, took a step into the Solar market with yield-enhancement software for solar fabs—basically DFM or DFY for the solar world—which should help get that market on track to radically cut costs the same way the rest of the semi industry has done over the past five decades. It’s about time we’re starting to see these kinds of tools for this market.

–Ed Sperling