The Week In Review: June 18
By Ed Sperling
Cadence completed its acquisition of Denali, moving the company squarely into the IP business for what amounts to an all-out IP arms race. Several sources have confirmed Cadence bid for Virage Logic first, but was outbid by Synopsys. Cadence subsequently made the $315 million offer for Denali. The selling price has lots of companies hanging out a “for sale” sign. The big question is who’s next?
ARM, the Common Platform companies (IBM, Samsung and GlobalFoundries) and Synopsys introduced a 32/28nm high k/metal gate that is “vertically optimized.” Exactly what “vertically optimized” means is something of a mystery, however. You won’t find any additional information about this in the release or in any of the links.
Mentor Graphics and Synopsys both updated some of their top tool suites at DAC, not to mention their relationships with foundries. Mentor is collaborating with GlobalFoundries on an advanced design and manufacturing flow using Calibre. It also added verification, extraction and DFM support for TSMC’s AMS 1.0 flow, as well as ESL, integrated design, and manufacturing closure for TSMC’s Reference Flow 11. In addition, Mentor’s Olympus SoC place and route is now supported by X-FAB.
Synopsys improved its PrimeTime performance for static timing analysis, migrated its Ly-nx pre-validated design environment for the Common Platform’s 32/28nm nodes. It also introduced a Galaxy characterization solution for standard cells, complex macros and memories, and it added StarRC custom 3D extraction for sub-45nm designs.
Cadence also provided its contribution to the Universal Verification Methodology, aka UVM—an open-source reference flow for SoC verification.
Atrenta introduced SpyGlass-Physical for physical implementation modeling. There was a lot of talk about tradeoff analysis and what-if approaches at DAC this year.
http://www.atrenta.com/atrenta-news/96.news
AMD inked a deal for Apache Design Systems’ power supply noise and reliability sign-off tools. Considering the close relationship between AMD and GlobalFoundries, this becomes particularly interesting.
Tags: AMD, Apache Design Solutions, ARM, Atrenta, Cadence, Common Platform, Denali, GlobalFoundries, IBM, Mentor Graphics, Samsung, Synopsys, Virage Logic, X-Fab