The Week In Review: Jan. 8
Friday, January 8th, 2010By Ed Sperling
The new year is off to a gallop, which either means the economy is recovering or everyone took the holidays off and now they’re playing catch-up.
There were a barrage of press releases over the past week. While individually they look like the usual marketing, collectively they tell a different story—and probably the first really positive one since the downturn hit. Business is up, design activity is up, and executives are back to pitching financial success to Wall Street.
Virage Logic signed a partnership deal with eSilicon to become an IP partner in eSilicon’s value chain. Virage also inked a deal to provide its Sonic Focus software on IDT’s codecs for PCs. and another deal to license its ARC processor cores to Phison, which makes USB drives and memory controllers.
Canon is migrating its India Design Centre to OVM and is using Mentor’s Questa verification platform. Business is healthy in Asia.
Top execs are back on the road again doing more than just sales calls, too. CEOs from Synopsys (Aart de Geus) and Actel (John East) will be presenting at the Needham conference in New York next week.
And electronics companies began talking up the products that are running their latest technology at CES. ARM is showcasing its Cortex-A9 processor in an NXP set-top box while MIPS is showcasing its cores in set-top boxes running Android.
Even jobs are beginning to return to the market, according to job boards. Some of this work is still on a consulting basis, but it’s at least a first step toward a broader recovery. Welcome to 2010.