By Ed Sperling
Virage Logic cut an interesting deal with NXP, the former Philips Semiconductor. Assuming the deal goes through, NXP gets to use Virage’s IP for 44 months, pays $60 million to Virage, and gives Virage a large chunk of its standard analog IP—not to mention 160 of its employees. So is this a case of crossing the pond or everyone swimming in the same pond?

Mentor’s deal to buy Valor was much simpler. Mentor will simply pay $82 million for Valor, which makes PCB productivity improvement software. Considering the push for holistic design that extends well beyond the chip, this is an interesting acquisition.

Synopsys took the covers off its high-level synthesis tool Synphony. This had been rumored for some time, but no one outside the company knew for sure what was happening—or at least they weren’t talking. It’s an interesting extension of Synopsys’ Synplicity acquisition, though. It allows engineers to migrate algorithms written in floating point to fixed point, or from The Mathworks‘ Matlab to RTL. This has been a big hole in Synopsys’ product lineup. Consider it filled.

TSMC issued its September sales report, confirming what many already knew: much of the buildup of the past few months was largely the result of an inventory shortage. Net sales dropped 3% from August, and 0.8% from September 2008.For the first 9 months, sales dropped 24.6% compared to the same period in 2008. Some companies are coming out of the recession nicely—notably Google, Apple and Intel—but it certainly isn’t going to be a straight line back for everyone.

ARM’s Techcon (formerly the ARM Developer Conference) is next week, and a large portion of the industry is lining up on ARM’s side to make presentations. This is newsworthy largely because it’s in context of one of the biggest wars to be fought in years in the chip industry, this one between ARM and Intel. ARM’s strength is its low-power cores, while Intel’s is performance. Both are struggling to reach parity (or superiority) in each other’s stronghold—ARM is working on more cores and Intel is working on low-power versions of Atom—and it should prove to be an interesting fight.

Tags: ARM, Intel, Mentor Graphics, NXP, Synopsys, The Mathworks, TSMC, Valor, Virage Logic

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