( ESNUG 551 Item 7 ) -------------------------------------------- [08/04/15]
Subject: Jolly, Atrenta, DAC, Innovus/ICC2, IJTAG, ARM, Silvaco Iliya, QCOM
POST-DAC CHILL: Here's the latest news & rumors I've heard about EDA and the
fabs post DAC'15. Feel free to comment/correct/scold!
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- TOLD YA SO! (part I): 6 days before it actually happened, DeepChip broke
the news that Ansys was acquiring John "Jolly" Lee's 6 engineer Big Data
start-up Gear Design Solutions. Booya! Jolly is known for Magma Mojove
Quartz DRC/LVS which gave MENT Calibre some trouble in ESNUG 445 #14.
Sources say Ansys paid $30 million for Gear -- which sounds hefty until
you realize Zacks Investment Research had downgraded ANSS from "hold" to
"sell" on May 10th -- along with most other Wall St analysts badmouthing
ANSS shares. Long story short, ANSS mechanical CAD sales aren't growing,
but for a few years Apache EDA sales were growing -- yet in the last few
months after Andrew Yang walked, many of the core Apache R&D staff have
been walking, too. A desperate Jim Cashman, CEO of Ansys, had to bring
in John Lee's "Big Data techniques for IR-drop/EM!" as a last hope.
Rumor is some recent "ex-" Apache R&D have "unresigned" now that Jolly
is on the Ansys masthead as a VP & GM.
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
- NOT SITTING IDLE: While Voltus, Cadence's IR-drop answer to the industry
dominant Apache Redhawk, so far completely lacks anything Big Data in
it; but Anirudh's R&D has not been sitting on their hands doing nothing.
At DAC, Anirudh's saledroids hyped Cadence's Voltus-DP (for "distrubuted
processing") with two different 16nm FinFET customer benchmarks:
size # of CPU runtime memory
old Voltus 146 M inst 16 23:32 hours 648 GB
Voltus DP 146 M inst 128 4:38 hours 122 GB
old Voltus 205 M inst 32 36:12 hours 880 GB
Voltus DP 205 M inst 256 6:24 hours 156 GB
They were all gushy getting 5-6X faster with 6-7X less memory use. I
suspect these were Juniper and Maxlinear benchmarks, but CDNS wouldn't
tell me. CDNS guys claim it's "signoff accuracy regardless of how
many CPUs/machine configurations are used" and "over 50 customers".
NO FREE LUNCH: For normal designs you can still run old Voltus multi-
threaded on one machine. But for large designs you'll need 10 trillion
CPUs across 10 trillion servers plus Voltus-DP if you want to get these
new quickie-but-signoff-accurate runs.
"Please sir, can I have some more [CPUs]?"
- Oliver Twist in an 1837 novel by Charles Dickens
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
- TOLD YA SO! (part II): And whopping 35 days before the official story
broke, DeepChip leaked Synopsys was acquiring Atrenta! SCOOP CITY!!!
Rumor is it was a Dassault vs. Synopsys bidding war; that is, neither
Cadence nor Mentor didn't bother to bid! Consensus gossip is ATRN was
$100 M to $150 M -- only 2X to 3X revenue -- with one source saying
that $150 M is best bet in ESNUG 550 #8.
Big question now: will Atrenta be a standalone division of Synopsys?
Or will it be diced up Borg-style as per the SNPS norm? I'm hearing
conflicting data on this. Many say Manoj and Anton will divvy up the
ATRN spoils; one says Ajoy Bose will keep running ATRN as is. Why this
is possible is because they're doing a 2nd Atrenta World on Oct. 21st.
Whatever the case, the SNPS Borg took over Atrenta on Monday, Aug 3rd.
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
- FUN QUOTE:
"Upside: We will now get SpyGlass and BugScope almost free as
part of our package license buy from Synopsys."
"Downside: Even though we're not a Tier 1 account, Atrenta customer
support would treat us like kings whenever we had any
issue. Now because we're nobodies, we'll get the standard
wait-in-line Synopsys customer support that all the other
nobodies get -- but now for SpyGlass and BugScope, too."
- Atrenta user on the DAC floor (06/08/15)
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
- TOLD YA SO! (part III): Waaay back in the Austin DAC Troublemakers
Panel in 2013, I openly asked Dean Drako a question that started with:
"Dean, with your personal net worth, you could open up your checkbook
and just buy most of the companies in this room..."
Well, it turns out during the week of DAC'15, Dean Drako actually bought
a web cloud access control company, Brivo, with a $50 M personal check!
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
- FUN FACTS:
DAC Full Conference Attendees
2010 : : ################ 1,554
2011 : : ################# 1,746
2012 : : ################### 1,901
2013 : : ################ 1,589
2014 : : ######################## 2,393
2015 : : ######################### 2,504 (+4.6%)
DAC Exhibit-Only Attendees
2010 : : ################### 1,890
2011 : : #################### 2,006
2012 : : ############################ 2,783
2013 : : ######################## 2,364
2014 : : ################# 1,650
2015 : : ################### 1,889 (+14.5%)
DAC Exhibitors
2010 : : ######################### 2,557
2011 : : ########################## 2,598
2012 : : ########################### 2,704
2013 : : #################### 1,998
2014 : : ########################### 2,658
2015 : : ########################## 2,618 (-1.5%)
If you look at EDA buyers (2,504 + 1,889 == 4,393) DAC'15 attendance
was up a healthy +8.6% vs. the 4,043 attendance of last year.
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
- FUN QUOTE:
"Exhibiting at DAC, when you add up the booth space, rentals,
travel expenses, hotel rooms, etc. costs us a total of $40K.
This more than pays for itself with the customer meetings we
had. DAC is by far the most efficient way we can reach many
of the right customers under one roof to show our SPICE
variation tools.
Having face-to-face meetings with our customers is so important
that outside of DAC we invest in travel which, given all of
their worldwide locations, adds up to much more than $40K.
Showing at DAC every year is a no brainer for Solido."
- Amit Gupta, CEO of Solido
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
- WATCH OUT, AART!: When Anirudh launched Innovus with his 44 jabs
against Synoposys IC Compiler II (see ESNUG 548 #1), CDNS had
ARM, Freescale, Juniper, Renesas, Maxlinear, and Spreadtrum as
customers openly endorsing Innovus. Freescale was no biggie cause
it's a longstanding CDNS house, but having "we-are-vendor-neutral"
ARM step up was big! (ARM even went ON PUBLIC RECORD reporting it
got better PPA with Innovus vs. ICC2 with its new Cortex-A72!)
What's new is last week in the CDNS 2Q15 earnings call Qualcomm,
Nvidia, ST and Faraday just went on public record endorsing CDNS
Innovus -- and these are well known SNPS houses! Add LG and
(shhhhhh!) Apple to that list and it looks like Aart has trouble.
Now the pregnant questions are: is Innovus replacing ICC/ICC2 at
Qualcomm/Nvidia/ST? Or is Innovus in one tiny group in these user
companies? Or is Innovus used in 10%/50%/90% of their chips? Or
for "test" blocks only??? Inquiring minds want to know! :)
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
- FUN QUOTE:
"I wish to categorically deny any rumors that Real Intent was in
talks to be acquired for $300 million. We would be insulted by
such a low bid."
- Prakash Narain, CEO of Real Intent on the news that
their rival, Atrenta, got acquired. (DAC 06/08/15)
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
- LIP-BU ON THE DEFENSIVE: One fun aspect of EDA watching is catching the
subtle hidden (yet public) attacks-and-counter-attacks that go on.
"On hardware front, Palladium XP won six new logos. One of our
newest Palladium 'use' models, Dynamic Power Analysis, is proving
to be vital in diagnosing and debugging software-related power
issues in mobile applications. Pre-production testing of our
next-generation emulator continues, and we remain on track to
start shipping later this year."
- Lip-Bu Tan, CDNS CEO on 15Q2 CDNS Earnings Call (07/27/15)
This seems benign until you realize that Wally's Big DAC Emulation
Announcement was how his MENT Veloce II now has super tight deep
hooks into Ansys Apache PowerArtist which does RTL power reduction
analysis (and data transfers) 4.5X faster. That "new" CDNS Dynamic
Power Analysis quote was Lip-Bu playing emulator defense! (Ouch!)
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
- WALLY'S TEST WORLD: Mentor has now done 11 live seminars worldwide
and 3 WebX webinars on IJTAG, the new IEEE 1687 standard for scan
testing IP blocks inside a chip. MENT had 777 total attendees.
IJTAG let's you do plug-and-play, pattern reuse, stacked die, etc.
AMD, NXP, Avago uses IJTAG -- yet SNPS & CDNS don't have it? Huh?
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
- SON OF IVAN: To everyone's surprise, after being away from DAC for
10 years -- and 3 years after Ivan Pesic's death -- Silvaco came back
to DAC with Ivan's 34 year old son Iliya Pesic as Chairman.
It's common knowledge how father Ivan micromanaged EVERY minor aspect
of Silvaco even down to personally approving customer visit train passes
for each employee in Japan. (See ESNUG 513 #7.) Now the big question
is how son Iliya -- with an MSEE, 5 years process engineer experience,
and speaks fluent Japanese plus some Korean -- either whips Silvaco into
shape as a truly scaleble "real" standalone EDA company... or not.
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
- RUMOR ON THE STREET: A single source says the Micron 20nm memories
and Samsung 14nm memories were both done in ProPlus NanoSPICE Giga.
That is, Samsung and Micron bailed on Synopsys FineSim Pro due to
accuracy problems during DRAM/FLASH leakage power simulations.
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
- RUMOR ON THE STREET (part II): A reliable single source says ARM is in
talks to buy Carbon Design Systems. (Don't know if firesale or not.)
Carbon stopped updating its web site and IP exchange on May 19th right
after it launched its virtual prototype for the ARM Cortex-A72.
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
- EDA VENDOR QUESTION:
"My team was exhausted after all the beforehand prep and on site work
required for DAC. We make EDA tools so DAC's expected.
But my engineers question Semicon West. Can you ask your EDA readers
if they believe exhibiting at Semicon West is worth the added time
and expense so soon (4 weeks) after DAC?"
- An Anon EDA Vendor
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
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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