By Ed Sperling

Arteris raised $9.7 million in a new “strategic” round of funding. While that may not seem like a lot of money, what’s far more interesting is who led that group—ARM and Qualcomm. Our take is that ARM thinks the NoC is a potential alternative to AMBA, the on-chip bus standard created by ARM, even though it won’t come out and say that. And Qualcomm is going to need NoCs to solve some of the complexity of power islands and multiple cores. Other investors are Synopsys and Japan’s giant DoCoMo Capital. This may speak volumes about the future of NoCs.

Mentor Graphics’ displaced workers program is the kind of industry involvement we need to see more of. So far, 452 engineers have taken classes through the program, and there are more classes available. Retooling is always a good idea, even if you’re not unemployed. For information, click here.

Synopsys was chosen by Hisilicon as its primary EDA partner. If the name sounds unfamiliar, just remember that Hisilicon is a subsidiary of Huawei—the Cisco of China. (There are some at Cisco who still insist that relationship is literal, even though Cisco dropped its IP theft lawsuit back in 2004.)

Actel updated its Q4 financial outlook. Revenues are expected to be right on target, which is up sequentially 2% to 6%. There’s nothing like hitting your numbers after a long recession.

Along the same lines, TSMC’s sales edged up 0.6% in November vs. October. If that doesn’t sound like much, consider that the foundry’s sales were down 17% for the first 10 months. November 2009 sales, incidentally, are 52% higher than November 2008. Break out the plastic cups.

TSMC is either feeling good about its numbers or looking for a hedge in the future–or both. The company invested $193 million in Motech Industries, a Taiwanese solar cell manufacturer that also owns its own fabs. In the recent downturn, though, solar didn’t work particularly well as a hedge strategy.

Mentor expanded its Questa multi-view verification components library to support the latest standards, including USB 3.0, Ethernet 40/100G and DDR2.

Cadence won a deal with AppliedMicro, which has standardized on Cadence’s Encounter platform.

Tags: Actel, AppliedMicro, Arteris, Cadence, Cisco, Hisilicon, Mentor Graphics, Motech, Syonpsys, TSMC

This entry was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 7:54 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.