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Synopsys recently announced they reached an agreement to acquire Magma. The natural questions are then “why”, and “is it a good thing”. Here are my two cents. The “why” first. For Synopsys, I can think of a few good reasons: Magma’s Talus Vortex is still a disruption for many P&R Synopsys deals. Magma’s FineSim [...] [...] Continue reading Why Synopsys buying Magma is good By now the EDA community should know that cloud computing in the industry is inevitable. Most CPU-time hungry tasks (e.g., logic simulation, extraction, physical verification) in the design flow cannot substantially be improved at the algorithmic level. Thus we must rely on massive parallelism to reduce wall time to acceptable levels. And since nobody wants [...] [...] Continue reading Why EDA in the cloud will come from startups So you got the news: Calypto acquired Catapult-C, the ESL synthesis tool from Mentor Graphics. Calypto has been into low power (using notably sequential optimization techniques) and sequential verification for a while. And the company has always been very close to Mentor Graphics: it had integrated its verification tool with Catapult-C as early as 2005. [...] [...] Continue reading Mentor quitting on ESL? On Thursday, April 21st, Amazon experienced a large outage that took down hundreds of websites, including the popular Foursquare, Reddit, Springpad, Hootsuite, BigDoor, and Quora. The service was fully resumed only 3 days later. Amazon released a full description of what happened. In a nutshell, Amazon shifted traffic in one of its zones from one [...] [...] Continue reading Amazon’s outage, a step back for EDA in the cloud? I don’t usually report news. I rather comment on them, or take position on various subjects. But for once, I’ll make an exception. I wrote a few posts on EDA and cloud computing –the latest was as recent as last week, where I posted about security in the cloud after a thread of comments on [...] [...] Continue reading Synopsys is getting into the cloud Today’s cloud market is hard to estimate and depends a lot on the analyst. One report predicts that the global cloud computing market is expected to grow from $37.8 billion in 2010 to $121.1 billion in 2015, with SaaS (Software as a Service) contributing for three quarter of this market. Regardless of the actual size, [...] [...] Continue reading EDA in the cloud: shall we be scared? Cloud computing is becoming more pervasive in many aspects of the day-to-day business of companies: archiving, payroll, CRM, etc. Whenever the cost of acquiring, maintaining, and scaling one’s own IT resources becomes too high, cloud computing start to become attractive. ASIC and digital system design is a computing resource-hungry task that would certainly benefit from [...] [...] Continue reading Cloud computing: an opportunity for EDA A month ago I stumbled upon Plunify, a startup that gives a fresh twist to EDA. Founded by HarnHua Ng and Kirvy Teo and established in Singapore, Plunify provides online access to various FPGA synthesis tools in the cloud. Through a slick web 2.0 interface, the user submits its design, which is then synthesized for [...] [...] Continue reading Plunify, a glimpse at EDA in the cloud Systems on Chip (SoCs) integrate increasingly complex hardware features with even more complex software applications, which makes validating SoCs a challenging task. FPGA-based prototyping has become an increasingly popular way of validating SoCs, for good reasons: FPGA devices have enough capacity to fit complex ASICs, and run fast enough to interact with real world interface [...] [...] Continue reading Meet InPA, a newcomer in FPGA-based prototyping No doubt that for the next two weeks you will find many DAC reports in blogs and corporate marketing websites. So I tried not to write yet another DAC report, with a long list of companies and products. Instead, I have chosen to share my absolutely non-exhaustive, completely biased view of DAC. I will then [...] [...] Continue reading DAC 47th digest: what you missed (even if you were there) |
 
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