By Ed Sperling
Mentor Graphics introduced an integrated component-to-system thermal characterization and analysis solution that combines hardware test with its FloTherm software. This is a particularly interesting more for the LED and IC packaging arenas, given the focus on leakage and heat.

Cadence won a deal with Panasonic for its Palladium XP platform, which combines simulation, acceleration and emulation. The tools will be used in a variety of digital consumer electronics.

HiSilicon has licensed eSilicon’s 40nm ternary content-addressable memory macros for its networking chips.

Blu-Wireless has licensed Sonics’ on-chip communications IP for its wireless communications processors aimed at the unlicensed 60 GHz market. Blu-Wireless will use the IP for a new generation of multi-gigabit communications for consumer electronics.

Synopsys claimed a share of the victory in GlobalFoundries first complex 20nm tapeout, complete with double patterning. A number of Synopsys tools were used to achieve silicon success.

By Ed Sperling
Synopsys rolled out its next-generation prototyping solution called Virtualizer, integrating technology it developed with the technology it acquired from Virtio, CoWare and VaST. The rollout is a strong indication of how complexity is forcing some interesting changes.  Synopsys also won a deal with Ricoh for Processor Designer  to speed DSP design, and another with Renesas for HAPS-64 Systems.

Cadence won a deal with Shenzhen-based HiSilicon for its Virtuoso parallel simulator. HiSilicon says the tool offers up to 24 times the performance on various circuits with different CPU configurations.

Arteris inked a deal with Toshiba for its FlexNoC interconnect IP. Toshiba will be using NoC technology in its future SoCs.

By Ed Sperling
Mentor Graphics sent a letter to shareholders urging them to ignore Carl Icahn’s proxy materials and pulling out all the stops in explaining Icahn’s underlying intentions and his nominees to the board of directors. The most interesting nominee in this group is Gary Meyers, former CEO of Synplicity. This one should keep you reading. Hold all calls.

Cadence swung solidly back into the black in Q1, reporting net income of $6 million on $266 million in revenue compared to a loss of $12 million in Q1 2010 on revenue of $222 million. CEO Lip-Bu Tan said demand was strong for products and services across all regions and that demand for the Verification Computing Platform was strong. Break out the champagne. Just don’t drive afterward. Cadence also rolled out the latest version of its Allegro PCB and IC packaging technology. This is version 16.5, by the way, so we figure it’s well tested.

Synopsys was touting the advances in its IC Compiler after one of its customers, HiSilicon, cut standby power consumption by up to 40% without affecting timing on blocks in a recently taped out design.

Sonics is distributing Synopsys‘ DDR memory controller IP, creating end-to-end memory subystems that use a NoC fabric and scheduler. This is an interesting move, and it will take on particular significance once the market turns to 2.5D stacking.

Tensilica’s audio IP core was awarded DTS Broadcast and Digital Media Player (DMP) certification, which is a big deal in the audio world. No other IP core vendors have it, which should say something. The certification is based on highly accurate pipeline-modeled instruction set simulation models of the audio DSPs. This should be coming to a home theater near you—assuming you actually get to spend time at home with a global semiconductor rebound now under way.

Witness the strong growth at MIPS. Q1 revenue was up 15% to $20 million, compared with $17.5 million in Q1 of 2010. Net income was $3.3 million vs. $3.1 million in 2010, reflecting an increase in R&D and marketing costs.
MIPS also announced that it now has the source code for Android 3.0, aka Honeycomb, which it is porting to the MIPS architecture.
The company also won a deal to provide SoCs to Taiwan’s ALi Corp. for the “triple play” market for voice, digital TV and broadband services.

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.