By Ed Sperling

It was a good week for thinking out of the package.

Mentor Graphics acquired Valor Computerized Systems, a recognition that system problems now extend well beyond the chip. Valor’s expertise is in PCB software and DFM. The purchase price was about $50 million, including $32.5 million in cash and 5.6 million shares of Mentor stock. Interestingly, Valor’s revenue for 2008—the last full year it reported—was about $40 million.

Mentor also inked a three-year joint-development deal with STMicroelectronics to develop advanced SoC design solutions down to 20nm.

Actel appears to be benefiting from its new SmartFusion rollout. The company updated guidance, saying Q1 revenue will be up 4% to 8%, instead of 2% to 6% it had previously reported. http://www.actel.com/company/press/files/busupdateQ110.pdf

Cadence is expanding its academic network in Europe, adding three universities from Bucharest, Stockholm and Braunschweig for everything from PCB design to low-power methodology.

Intel rolled out its first six-core 32nm Xeon chip for servers, claiming it offers 60% more performance for the same power consumption of 130 watts. Versions of the chips with lower clock speeds can use as little as 40 watts.

By Ed Sperling
Virage Logic cut an interesting deal with NXP, the former Philips Semiconductor. Assuming the deal goes through, NXP gets to use Virage’s IP for 44 months, pays $60 million to Virage, and gives Virage a large chunk of its standard analog IP—not to mention 160 of its employees. So is this a case of crossing the pond or everyone swimming in the same pond?

Mentor’s deal to buy Valor was much simpler. Mentor will simply pay $82 million for Valor, which makes PCB productivity improvement software. Considering the push for holistic design that extends well beyond the chip, this is an interesting acquisition.

Synopsys took the covers off its high-level synthesis tool Synphony. This had been rumored for some time, but no one outside the company knew for sure what was happening—or at least they weren’t talking. It’s an interesting extension of Synopsys’ Synplicity acquisition, though. It allows engineers to migrate algorithms written in floating point to fixed point, or from The Mathworks‘ Matlab to RTL. This has been a big hole in Synopsys’ product lineup. Consider it filled.

TSMC issued its September sales report, confirming what many already knew: much of the buildup of the past few months was largely the result of an inventory shortage. Net sales dropped 3% from August, and 0.8% from September 2008.For the first 9 months, sales dropped 24.6% compared to the same period in 2008. Some companies are coming out of the recession nicely—notably Google, Apple and Intel—but it certainly isn’t going to be a straight line back for everyone.

ARM’s Techcon (formerly the ARM Developer Conference) is next week, and a large portion of the industry is lining up on ARM’s side to make presentations. This is newsworthy largely because it’s in context of one of the biggest wars to be fought in years in the chip industry, this one between ARM and Intel. ARM’s strength is its low-power cores, while Intel’s is performance. Both are struggling to reach parity (or superiority) in each other’s stronghold—ARM is working on more cores and Intel is working on low-power versions of Atom—and it should prove to be an interesting fight.

By Ed Sperling

Acquisitions are beginning to pick up in the system-level design world, signaling that even if the market isn’t fully recovered top executives believe it has at least bottomed and started its journey back from the depths of despair.

Virage Logic has stated its intention to acquire some of NXP’s intellectual property—and pick up 160 of its employees. Because NXP—formerly Philips Semiconductor—is a Dutch company, it requires the approval of a workers’council.

“These are the pieces we don’t have in our portfolio right now, like analog IP,  high-speed I/O and SoC infrastructure IP,” said Alex Shubat, Virage’s president and CEO. “We will be able to bundle this and integrate it with the rest of our IP to create re-usable components.”

Analog IP as a whole has been a tough market for companies for companies to crack because much of the IP in this market isn’t re-usable. NXP’s approach has been to develop more standardized analog IP, such as video decoding for digital TVs and set-top boxes, but it lacks some of the other pieces required to make a complete solution. Coupled with Virage’s previous acquisition of ARC, this potentially can make Virage a powerhouse in a number of high-volume consumer electronics areas.

As part of the complex deal, NXP also gets access to Virage’s IP portfolio for 44 months and will receive 2.5 million shares of Virage stock, priced today at just under $6 a share. It also agrees to pay Virage $60 million over four years.

The NXP deal was the second significant deal in the past few days. Mentor Graphics also signed a deal to acquire Valor Computerized Systems, an Israel-based maker of PCB productivity software, for $82 million. The deal is a recognition by Mentor that system-level design now reaches well beyond the chip and out onto the entire printed circuit board.

Mentor is not alone in this recognition. Companies like IBM have been talking about holistic design that spans well beyond the semiconductor for several years.