It was a slow week for new product introductions, but a time to trumpet new customer wins. Taken individually, these are generally not particularly interesting to anyone except the account rep and the CFO. Taken as a whole after a long period of soft or even non-existent sales, this is like rain after a long drought.

Synopsys inked a broad deal with Exar to become its leading EDA partner. Mentor Graphics inked a similar type of deal for its Calibre physical verification and DFM flow at Fujitsu. And ARM licensed its multiprocessing technology to Netronome, which also signed a broad relationship with Cadence.

So is this a sustainable trend, or just a coincidence of budgeting? Our thinking is it’s the beginning of a trend, but the line is going to look a bit more jagged than anyone would hope.

Magma introduced its new RTL to GDSII chip implementation system, Talus 1.1. This may explain why the company has been so quiet of late. Good timing for new timing closure technology, given the apparent uptick.

While everyone else is slogging along at ground level, Intel introduced its 8-core Xeon processor with 2.3 billion transistors. Interestingly, the chip will incorporate some of the “reliability, availability and serviceability” features found in the Itanium chips. So what does this mean for Itanium, which never really got off the ground? That’s the real story worth watching.

On the manufacturing front, TSMC introduced its unified interconnect modeling format for 65nm and 40nm. Interconnects in general, and networks on chip in particular, are becoming a critical piece of SoC architectures because it’s no longer possible to do all this stuff on a spreadsheet without your brain exploding. But our guess is this will become part of the restrictive design rules TSMC will impose over the next couple generations because EUV lithography is late.

When it comes to business, all the fabs have been remarkably quiet of late. Are they too busy to bother telling us what’s happening, or are they too embarrassed? C’mon guys, we’d like to hear from you. It has an effect on what the rest of us are doing.

Tags: ARM, Cadence, Intel, Magma, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, TSMC

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 6:51 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.