The Week In Review: March 12
By Ed Sperling
Synopsys is teaming up with Imec, the Belgian research lab, to help solve the problems of 3D IC stacking and through-silicon vias. This is important stuff for re-use of older technologies, not to mention cutting verification time and achieving timing closure and getting chips to market on time and improving yield and…well, you get the idea. Synopsys also added design-rules-driven technology to Galaxy Custom Designer that helps speed DRC repair tasks.
Mentor Graphics added Amba 4 verification IP to its Questa library. Given the growing popularity of ARM’s processor, this is a necessary step—especially with Mentor’s commitment to the Android phone.
Actel got its first public endorsement of its new SmartFusion chip. Micrium is porting its embedded software stack to the mixed-signal FPGA. Micrium’s software is targeted at the ARM Cortex-M processor line.
TSMC sales were up 0.1% from January to February, which isn’t much. But when you consider that’s 144% higher than last year it starts putting things in perspective. Still, it would be nice to have a breakdown by process nodes.
Tags: Actel, ARM, IMEC, Mentor Graphics, Micrium, Synopsys, TSMC