Buying Patterns
Dec. 17, 2008 – Virage Logic withdrew its bid to buy  LogicVision for $1.05 per share. Translation: “If you won’t have us, we won’t have you, either.” Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that LogicVision’s stock has been sliding recently, which could make it an even cheaper buy in the future.Â
Synopsys plans to buy ProDesign’s CHIPit business for co-verification. ProDesign, based in Germany, is a private company. And no, there’s no price mentioned in this deal. But given the state of the German chip business these days, we figured Synopsys paid for the purchase in beer and knockwurst.
A number of companies have been qualifying their tools and IP at 40nm, which is the node that TSMC is pushing in what appears to be a game of foundry one-upmanship. Mentor qualified its Olympus SoC place and route system, Virage Logic moved its 40nm embedded memory and logic library IP to low power, which offers other bragging rights.
ARM is joining the Open Handset Alliance based upon Google’s Android. One of the problems in handsets has always been trading off power for performance. This may accomplish both, which should pose an interesting challenge to the iPhone and Blackberry, providing the vendors developing the phones can actually get them out the door.
–Ed Sperling
