( ESNUG 517 Item 3 ) -------------------------------------------- [01/17/13]
Subject: News & Rumors on Apple, TSMC, QCOM, HP, Altera, Jedat, OneSpin
ITEM 3: Here's the latest news & rumors I've heard about EDA and fabs since
my prior post. Feel free to comment/correct/scold anything you see here!
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- AppleInsider.com recently published the article: "TSMC contracted to
build A6X chips for Apple this quarter, pushing out Samsung". The
story says it's for trial production citing that a full switch from
Samsung to TSMC is a "complex transition that could take Apple as
long as 18 months to complete" and that "Project Azalea" is most
likely TSMC deciding whether to place its new Apple-dedicated fab in
either New York, California, Texas, or Oregon. So those Apple/TSMC
rumors 4 months ago in ESNUG 509 #9 were right after all!
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- I understand Samsung's new 5.5" 1280 x 720 HD flexible screens and
Intel Red Ridge tablets at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, but
Nvidia Tegra 4, Qualcomm Snapdragon Krait 300/400 and GlobalFoundries
14 nm wafers??? Huh? Out of 150,000 attendees, maybe 300 were chip
designers who knew what these were. The other 149,700 were looking
for an Apple iPhone 6 prototype and Snooki sightings. D'oh!
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- HP's Inkjet Printer division publically reaffirmed that they've been
regularly using Mentor Pyxis for full custom AMS and digital CMOS and
MEMs designs for some years now. Their press release hyped Pyxis'
"design data management, design capture, simulation control, ECO's,
results visualization, layout editor with floorplanning, concurrent
editing and a custom router" and "OpenAccess, iPDK, EDIF, LEF/DEF".
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- If you're a Cadence user, you might have collectively noticed that
no CDNS sales guys have been calling customers this week. Why?
That's because they're all in Las Vegas at the Red Rock Casino
attending the 2013 Cadence Sales Kick-off. Not to worry, they'll
be calling you next week with 10X the enthusiasm they had before!
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- Carbon Design just appointed Hal Conklin to VP Sales and Marketing.
Conklin was the "C" in CLK Design -- where he served as their VP
Sales and Marketing. I checked CLK's web site. NO Sales/Marketing
person listed! Does this mean that CLK DA is now in trouble?
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- FUN QUOTE
"I'm starting a fund to pay for Brett's G.E.D."
- Shawn McCloud of Calypto about Forte beating
Calypto by 1% in the 2011 ESL Synthesis Market
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- A 3 day old Motley Fool article did a funky Wall St analysis on
Altera (ALTR) focused on "work-in-progress inventory" said:
"On a trailing-12-month basis, work-in-progress inventory was
the fastest-growing segment, up 44.9%. On a sequential-quarter
basis, work-in-progress inventory was also the fastest-growing
segment, up 14.3%. Blah, blah... ... suggesting management
sees increased demand on the horizon." (MF 01/14/13)
Although Altera (ALTR) shares have been hovering around $32 for the
past 10 months when it was $40 before, this Motley Fool title of
"This Metric Suggests You're Right to Own Altera" speaks volumes.
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- My congrats go to OneSpin Solutions GmbH! Even though they failed
to show at DAC'12; causing rumors of their death in ESNUG 506 #6.
It turns out that after Raik Brinkmann replaced Peter Feist as CEO,
OneSpin got additional funding from Azini Capital and is working on a
"push button logic equivalence checker" for Oasys' RealTime Designer
RTL synthesis tool. They even sold OneSpin 360 MV ABV bug hunters
to three business units inside the 9,300 employee Maxim Integrated.
Wow! And they say they'll be at DVcon'13 and DAC'13, too! Congrats!
Now if only I could find out whatever happened to Nangate, CAST,
Tuscany, Silicon Frontline, Polyteda, Zocalo, and Coupling Wave...
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- IEEE Spectrum ranked tiny Tela Innovations as #11 in Semiconductor
Manufacturing category in its annual Patent Power edition. It's not
raw numbers of patents, but how kickass each patent is. Although
Tela only did 31 patents in 2011, it got 11th place; while Intel
had 1,313 in 2011, and it got 12th place.
In the Computer Software category, Synopsys got 11th place with
140 patents, Mathworks 14th with 99, Cadence 16th with 137.
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- FUN QUOTE
"I've been telling Synopsys to do this for 10 years now!"
- Gary Smith on the news that SNPS bought EVE
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- The Xilinx Zynq-7000 (which uses an ARM Cortex-A9) was named one
of 17 "2012 Products of the Year" by Electronic Products Magazine;
along with the ARM Cortex-A57/53 and IDT's NVMe 1.1 FLASH Memory
Controller to "handle up to 4-Tbytes using 64-Gbit flash chips."
Most curious awarded was Franklin AS3935 lightning sensor IC which
"detects lightning activity as it approaches from up to 40 km away".
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- A little bird told me one Feb 5th Common Platform Tech Forum session
will have an IBM Albany NanoTech researcher on "silicon nanowires, a
potential successor to FinFET's", an IBM TJ Watson Center researcher
on carbon nanotubes, and Cadence's Vassilios Gerousis detailing
the Cadence-ARM-IBM and Cadence-ARM-Samsung 14 nm tape-outs. Fun!
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- Promoting a buy-us-because-we're-cheaper strategy, Jedat has just
launched Cforce, a "high accuracy" SPICE simulator that's supposedly
"2x to 3x" faster than Synopsys/Cadence/Mentor SPICE at 1/10th cost.
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And again, feel free to comment/correct/scold/question anything you see here
by just emailing me directly. And, yes, you'll be ANONYMOUS!
- John Cooley
DeepChip.com Holliston, MA
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