The Week In Review: Jan. 6
By Ed Sperling
Mentor Graphics introduced protocol transactors written specifically for its Veloce emulator. This dramatically speeds things up because the transactors allow engineers to use stimuli generated by OVM, UVM, and SystemC, among others, and then to apply them to the DUT running on the emulator. The transactors work with a broad range of buses and interfaces, as well.
Tensilica added Dolby Volume to its HiFi Audio DSPs, which allows consistent playback volume for all content and using all sources. For anyone who has raced to minimize the audio assault of extremely loud commercials, this is a big improvement.
Taiwanese memory maker Nanya Technology endorsed Synopsys’ Proteus lithography rule check solution. This kind of technology will become increasingly important over the next couple nodes, particularly with double patterning and potentially even triple patterning.
For all the talk about design starts being down, the value certainly isn’t decreasing. What is changing, however, is that more is moving out of the hands of centralized processing companies and into the SoC ecosystem. A report from Markets And Markets says the SoC market will reach $225 billion by 2016, up from $85.9 billion in 2011.
CEVA introduced a low-power programmable DSP for camera-enabled devices, which includes most of the popular mobile devices these days. Video and imaging functions are distributed across multiple processor engines, which is definitely a plus in video and image processing.
Tags: CEVA, Mentor Graphics, Nanya Technology, Synopsys, Tensilica