The Week In Review: April 10
The stock market came roaring back to life on news that Wells Fargo Bank had a stellar quarter and job losses—still not good—were at least not worse than before.
You wouldn’t know that over at TSMC, which has held steady throughout the downturn. The foundry issued an announcement that it had terminated 200 employees due to what it called “deteriorating business conditions.” Chartered Semiconductor went through that exercise last year.
Job losses are a trailing indicator, though. The rest of the economy appears to be at least stabilizing, while the stock market, which is always volatile, is an early indicator of recovery. It goes up first, and it goes down last. Go figure.
Virage Logic inked a deal with IBM over the PowerPC platform, a deal that has more significance than you might guess. IBM has been building an ecosystem of partners, and one of the big attractions is legal protection over IP. IBM lawyers are legendary, even if they don’t always win. When the company went up against the U.S. Justice Department in 1955 (and subsequently lost in 1956) it had a photo taken of its team of 100 lawyers. All of them were impeccably dressed, of course.
Synopsys rolled out a multicore version of its Discovery platform, both for multicore designs and running multicore systems. This is a trend, and others have already have hammered a stake in the ground.
Mentor Graphics, meanwhile, added advanced low power features to its Olympus place-and-route platform, which is almost a prerequisite in any toolset these days. This is another trend, and they’re not alone here.
Tags: business, IBM, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, TSMC, Virage Logic