Mentor Graphics inked a deal with EDA Direct, a distributor, for its PCB and FPGA products. Just to put things in perspective, Mentor is the only major EDA company that has an indirect channel, which cuts down the cost of sales in a high-volume market. That should say something about the state of the EDA market, in general.

And along the same lines, Synopsys and Actel renewed their OEM relationship for FPGA design software, which became essential after Synopsys bought Synplicity. Given the low-power focus of Actel and the heavy push by Synopsys into low-power design, this relationship bears watching.

Analog has been getting a lot of attention these days, although mostly in the layout area. Synopsys just added analog simulation to its Galaxy platform.  They’re not alone, of course. Mentor, Cadence and Magma all have offerings in this space. The only question is whether analog engineers will actually use these tools. In pure analog chips the jury is still out, but in mixed signal chips these kinds of tools are generally seen as useful.

Moore’s Law has always been an economic equation, despite the fact that most design engineers see it alternately as an interesting challenge and a royal pain in the neck. The simple fact is that if you put twice as many transistors on a piece of silicon, it’s cheaper to make the entire device because you can include more functions on that chip, thus requiring fewer parts overall. The use of chemical vapor deposition has been well established, but using silicon oxynitride at 28nm has not. This is something of a breakthrough using a standard technology at a new node, and TSMC claims the title.

Tags: Actel, Cadence, EDA Direct, Magma, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, TSMC

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