The Week In Review: Feb. 12
Synopsys gobbled up another software prototyping supplier—CoWare—a company that never quite made it public despite its historically close relationship with Cadence. This pretty much clears out the field of software prototyping companies. Synopsys has announced plans to buy VaST. It already bought Virtio in 2006. And Wind River snapped up Virtutech before it was acquired by Intel.
Whether this is good or bad depends on your point of view, but it’s hard to argue that SoCs cannot be improved—particularly when it comes to multicore and multi-power domain implementations—when software is considered way up front in the design. Terms of the CoWare deal weren’t disclosed, meaning the purchase price wasn’t significant enough to warrant disclosing them.
Speaking of acquisitions, memory maker Micron is buying Numonyx, the joint venture between STMicroelectronics, Intel and Francisco Partners for $1.27 billion in stock. Memory is a nasty node-by-node competitive business, and anything that can be done to gain an edge is worth a lot of money.
TSMC’s numbers exploded in January vs. the previous year—up 134%–but they slipped slightly from December 2009, down 4.5%. It’s hard to read too much into consecutive monthly fluctuations, but year-over-year numbers are a sign that growth is back. action=detail&language=E&newsid=4541 TSMC also expanded its relations with IC makers and technology centers inside of China, but that’s all we know. The rest is in Chinese.
Tags: Cadence, CoWare, Intel, Micron, Numonyx, STMicroelectronics, Synopsys, TSMC, VaST, Virtio, Virtutech
February 12th, 2010 at 12:10 pm
Funny to read that “Wind River snapped up Virtutech before it was acquired by Intel”, when from Wind River’s web site “About the Company”, it says……… “Wind River became a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel(R) Corporation on July 17, 2009″. I believe Intel bought Virtutech with the plan of it being integrated within its Wind River subsidiary.