** firstRain announced the appointment of Penny Herscher as President and CEO, and $10+ million in venture capital. The funding was led by Ampersand Ventures. Former CEO, company co-founder Gaurav Rewari, will now be Chief Strategy Officer. The company is headquartered in Foster City, CA and has 80+ employees across offices in New York City, Boston, New Delhi and Mumbai, India.

Prior to joining firstRain, Herscher was Chairman and CEO of Simplex Solutions. She took Simplex public in 2001, and oversaw the sale to Cadence Design Systems in 2002. Herscher then worked with Cadence as CMO and General Manager of a software division. Prior to Simplex, she served in an executive capacity at Synopsys. Herscher started her career as an R&D engineer at TI and then Daisy Systems. Herscher serves on the boards of firstRain, the Anita Borg Institute and California Community Partners for Youth. She has a BA in mathematics from Cambridge University in the U.K.

** Pulsic says it has named Buno Pati to its Board of Directors. Previously Pati was Founder and CEO of Numerical Technologies, starting in 1995. Before co-founding Numerical, Pati was an assistant professor in EECS at Harvard. Previously, he led a research group at Stanford University that developed the original technology for Numerical. Pati is on the Board of Directors for several private companies, and the Board of Visitors of the University of Maryland’s Clark School of Engineering. His Ph.D. in EE is from the University of Maryland at College Park. The Board of Directors at Pulsic also includes company CEO Ken Roberts, COO Mark Williams, Neil Rimer of Index Ventures, Monish Suri from Prime Technology Ventures, and EDA investor Wai Yan Ho.

** Celoxica has named Keith Hopkins to its Board of Directors as a non-executive director. Most recently, he was Vice President of Business Development at ARM. Hopkins came to ARM through the Artisan acquisition. Previously, he held executive positions at Denali Software, ClickServices.com, Mentor Graphics, Integrated Measurement Systems and Daisy Systems. Early on, Hopkins was a senior hardware design engineer for Intel. He has a BSEE from the University of Tennessee.

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** ARM announced its new DesignStart program, which the company says will provide developers with access to the ARM7TDMI processor for the TSMC, UMC, SMIC and Chartered Semiconductor process technologies. Per the Press Release: "This program will use the web channel developed for its Artisan physical IP products to distribute the DesignStart kit for the ARM7TDMI processor online at no charge. This will enable design teams to gain instant access to ARM IP, allowing them to rapidly design and validate their SoC designs."

"The new program significantly extends the existing ARM Foundry Program. The web-based design kits enable engineers to complete the design process all the way through chip-level verification. Once the design is finished and ready for fabrication, a single-use design license can be purchased to receive a full set of deliverables and thus enable tape out and manufacture at any of the supported foundries."

Neal Carney, Vice President of Marketing at ARM, is quoted: "Semiconductor designers at fabless start-up companies are looking to gain access to ARM(r) technology in the easiest, most flexible manner possible. The ARM DesignStart program successfully leverages the existing ARM Artisan channel, extending the reach of ARM microprocessor IP to a vast range of designers across the globe and in particular should accelerate time-to-market for start-up companies This program is the first innovative business model to result from the ARM acquisition of Artisan."

** Newfield Technology announced it has joined the CoWare CoTeam Partner Program as a service provider. The CoTeam Program "aligns CoWare with EDA, embedded software, IP, services and training providers offering customers integrated solutions that ease their design process." Newfield says the company will develop SystemC and LISA 2.0 models for CoWare’s ConvergenSC IP Model Library.

John McNally, President and General Manager for Newfield Technology, is quoted: "Companies who adopt ESL technologies are seeking solutions to simultaneously reduce engineering costs and accelerate time-to-market. Newfield provides ESL design and verification services that enable system and semiconductor companies to gain significant competitive advantage. We are pleased to partner with industry leader CoWare to develop models for its extensive IP model library."

** Open Core Protocol International Partnership (OCP-IP) announced that Zuken Inc. has joined the organization. Per the Press Release: "The addition of Zuken to the membership roster builds upon the tremendous support that OCP-IP has already enjoyed throughout Japan and adds to local membership including Semiconductor Technology Academic Research Center (STARC), Governing Steering Committee member Toshiba, Yamaha, and FueTrek."

Takashi Yokokawa, General Manager of the SoC Design Center of Zuken, is quoted: "Using OCP will help our customers produce chips and systems on time and within budget. We encourage the standardization and interoperability of on chip components that OCP enables. We selected OCP as our on-chip interface due to its flexibility, completeness of specification, and widespread adoption."

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** AccelChip Inc. announced that the company has been named one of 200 finalists for the Red Herring 100 Private Companies of North America award program.

** Sequence Design also says it's very happy to be one of the 200 Finalists for the Red Herring 100 Companies selected for the award program.

** Red Herring says that more than 900 nominations were submitted for consideration. The Red Herring 100 Winners will be announced mid-May at the magazine's Spring 2005 conference.

Per the Press Release: "The two hundred finalists will be evaluated to determine the Red Herring 100 that embody innovation, technology, and strategy. The Red Herring editorial team has completed a thorough analysis of business model, competitive advantage, alliances, customers, and technology for each company." I would certainly hope so.

Joel Dreyfuss, EIC at Red Herring, is quoted: "There were many strong candidates for the Red Herring 100 list this year, so making it onto the list is quite an achievement. In the post-bubble era, North American technology companies have focused on making sure management is strong and that the business model makes sense." Prior to that, apparently such things didn't matter as much?

By the way – "The three-day intimate event is themed: 'The Dynamics of Disruptions' and will shine its light on the business of technology, featuring keynotes and roundtable discussions. The Red Herring Spring conference is an invitation-only gathering for CEOs, venture capitalists, and select senior executives." Don't call them. They'll call you.

** Ignios Ltd. is delighted to report that it has been included in the list of "Cool Vendors" in the April 2005 "Cool Vendors in Semiconductors, 2005" report, published by Jim Tully, et al of Gartner, Inc.

Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that:

* Innovative – enable users to do things they couldn't do before
* Impactful – have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology)
* Intriguing – have caught Gartner's interest or curiosity

Per the Press Release: "The latest Gartner report highlighted six vendors considered to be 'coolest' in their areas of innovation. According to the Gartner report, cool vendors will have business impact. Almost every significant SoC design start today contains multiple cores – including DSPs, microprocessors, hardware accelerators and other system resources. Managing those resources poses a considerable problem from a system and software design perspective. [Ignios'] SystemWeaver provides a very efficient hardware solution to this software problem. Although SystemWeaver offers the maximum payback when deployed in multicore chips containing higher numbers of computing resources, the benefits of flexibility and improved debugging capability can also be leveraged in traditional ‘RISC plus DSP’ multicore architectures."

Please note:

Gartner says its listing "does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness of a particular purpose." I would certainly hope not.

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** Emulation and Verification Engineering (EVE) has sent out a Press Release bragging on last year's success. They're the envy of all their friends because of " doubling its customer base, reaching a total of 25 customers, and reporting a record growth of 380% over the previous year."

In the past year, EVE has closed a second round of funding totaling $7.2 million, introduced a new product to its ZeBu verification platform family, appointed Venk Shukla to its Board of Directors, named Al Lipinski as Vice President of North American Sales and Dino Caporossi as Vice President of Corporate Marketing, opened Nihon EVE Kabushiki Kaisha (K.K.), signed distributors in China, India Israel, and Eastern Europe, and overall expanded the company by more than 50 employees.

Luc Burgun, EVE CEO and President is quoted in the Press Release: "The groundswell of market acceptance confirms that our ZeBu platform is the only verification solution on the market to address hardware/software integration and embedded software validation at more than five MHz on designs exceeding 10 millions ASIC gates. We’re upbeat and anticipate a great year of growth and profitability by further augmenting our blue chip customer base."

In a phone call with company executives, Vice President of Marketing and GM for U.S. operations Lauro Rizzatti told me: "We have 25 customers now, 12 or 13 were added in this past fiscal year alone. There are actually 2 more customers [on the list], but we're not allowed to disclose the names as yet. One is a star in the Valley who will allow us to use their name in a month or so. We were competing for that account with large, established emulation vendors, so that was a very big win for us. All in all, it was a great 2004 for us!"

I asked CEO Luc Burgeon about the EVE Exit Strategy: "Our only motivation right now is to be successful. Perhaps someday we'll be acquired by one of the big guys in EDA [in order] to have access to their sales channel. Or, our exit strategy might be an IPO because we have something bigger in mind. But for right now, we're only thinking in terms of our product portfolio, to grow the company bigger and bigger. For us, being successful means being able to take a bigger part of the market. We believe we [are well positioned to] do that with our tools."

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Nassda Corp. announced financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2005, the second quarter of Nassda's fiscal 2005. Revenue for the quarter ended March 31, 2005 was $12.3 million, an increase of 26% from $9.8 million for the quarter ended March 31, 2004 and an increase of 10% from $11.3 million for the quarter ended December 31, 2004. Net income for the quarter ended March 31, 2005 was $1.9 million.

Sang Wang, Nassda CEO, is quoted: "We are very proud to have achieved another quarter of sequential revenue growth and returned to profitability with a 12% operating income, despite the substantial costs incurred related to the pending acquisition. Our total cash, cash equivalents and short-term investment balances have also increased to $107.9 million at March 31, 2005. Due to the pending acquisition, we are not providing any business outlook or guidance for the coming quarters."

Probably a wise move. The Synopsys acquisition is believed to be imminent.