Guides

Breakfast in the Valley: What makes a new consumer product successful? It all comes down to a good idea, streamlining the development process and a deep understanding of the end market.

With advanced features in the automobile such as telematics, entertainment, navigation and electronic stability control requiring equally advanced electronics, the fact that there is an increasing amount of electronic sophistication in the automobile is not new. What is new, however, is the increased focus that semiconductor and system level design tool providers are paying to the automotive industry.

Electronic News' Ed Sperling discusses why business issues have quietly become an interesting EDA challenge of their own in this "Now Hear This!" post.

Electronic News' Ann Steffora Mutschler ponders the potential impact to the market, if in fact, the private equity buyout rumors are true about Cadence Design Systems entertaining suitors, in this entry of "The Sandbox."

Rajeev Madhavan, CEO of Magma Design Automation, sounds off on what pieces are missing in EDA—and who's going to provide them.

Ever since the emergence of RTL and cell-based synthesis, the teams that design high-end microprocessors have worked differently than the teams that design SOCs. That's been an industry axiom. But it may be an axiom on its way into history.

The overall numbers of vendors developing in-house EDA tools may be down, but largest companies like IBM and Freescale still see homegrown EDA software as a competitive advantage and a necessity.

With its announcement this week of its plans for 45-nm, IBM has stepped away from the normal pattern. EDN's Ron Wilson comments on the 45-nm move in this "Practical Chip Design" post.

EDN's Mike Santarini discusses a Magma Design Automation DAC briefing with editors in this "Between The Lines" entry.

During a panel discussion on the challenges of designing advanced SoCs yesterday, one of the rarely mentioned issues in the chip design cycle momentarily crept into the spotlight. Bringing up the silicon -- a delicate and time-consuming task that tends to get little thought from the EDA community and often only belated afterthought by chip designers. Read what EDN's Ron Wilson has to say on the topic in this "Practical Chip Design" post.

EDA vendors on a conference panel say manufacturing data is not there in the form they can use, despite what foundries say.

EDA executives make conservative 10-year predictions, but touch on Moore's Law, multicore trends, the need for system-level design, and more.

Another lackluster conference highlights the challenges EDA companies face.

Kuo Wu, deputy director of TSMC's product and design services marketing division, sounds off on the state of the EDA market, coordination among the players in the semiconductor ecosystem, the challenges of IP reuse, and more.

EDA and IP companies find that joining consortiums to offset development costs is no guarantee of success as competition within ecosystems is beginning to heat up. While the idea behind these consortiums led by IBM, TSMC, UMC and others is that no single company can afford to do everything by itself anymore, the reality is that these consortiums can’t afford to support additional development and integration at the same level for all members.

Lawrence D. Burns, VP of R&D and strategic planning for General Motors, said during a keynote that new automotive technologies will cause a paradigm shift in the design of new cars and trucks, sparking new opportunities for the engineering community to play a part.

Cadence, Magma, Mentor Graphics and Synopsys have all developed EDA software and tools to support MIPS Technologies' 32-bit processor family, the 74K.

No EDA company has made an IPO (initial public offering) since 2001, and the number of EDA acquisitions has slowed considerably in recent years. Despite this, according to panelists in a DAC Pavilion panel Monday, the exit-strategy outlook for EDA firms isn't entirely grim, and some truly have the end goal of IPO in mind. The big question is when?

ARM IP block collects on-chip dataflow statistics, generates simulated traffic.

The official Web site for the 44th Design Automation Conference (DAC), the electronic design automation (EDA) industry's premier event.