By Ed Sperling
Japan’s SoC market, which has been a big market for advanced EDA tools, may be headed for a major consolidation. Renesas, Fujitsu and Panasonic are in talks to combine portions of their business in conjunction with the Japanese government’s Innovation Network Corp., according to numerous news reports. One particularly interesting addition to these changes in Japan: GlobalFoundries may buy Elpida Memory’s Hiroshima fab. Whether all of these changes create a larger and much stronger market for tools and services, or whether it actually shrinks, is a big question mark.
Cadence is collaborating with Samsung for 32, 28 and 20nm DFM flows. Key to the deal are pattern classification and search, CMP prediction, and both litho and yield analysis.
Synopsys won a deal with CSR for its Galaxy implementation platform. CSR makes everything from low-energy Bluetooth chips to GPS ICs.
eSilicon expanded its SerDes licensing deal with Avago. Under the terms of the deal, eSilicon will be able to include Avago’s SerDes cores—from 28nm to 90nm—in chips for the communications and storage markets. http://www.esilicon.com/press-releases/195-esilicon-expands-serdes-ip-licensing-agreement-with-avago-technologies-
Methodics rolled out a new release of its IP version-control product, aka Subversion, boosting performance and improving the distributed use model. As IP use and re-use grows, keeping track of IP in complex designs is turning out