People November 28, 2005 Busy, busy, busy ... ************************************ People in the news ... Kaushik Sheth is CEO and co-founder at Rio Design Automation. The other co-founders include Robi Dutta, Chairman of the Board, and Egino Sarto, CTO. The company is located in Santa Clara, and has received financing from both Cadence and Magma, as well as from several angel investors. I had to chance to speak by phone on November 18th with Kaushik Sheth, at which time he explained the motivation for starting the company. Among Kaushik's comments: "I'm a chip designer and my partner is a hard-core chip designer. I've been in the industry for 20 years or so, and have gone through various chip design flows. I've been exposed to the complete cycle of starting a design from scratch, getting it back from the lab, putting it in a product and shipping it." "In that process, I've realized that there are several pain points [which the EDA companies] do not completely address. They've left [those problems] to be solved by experts in the field, but people are crying out for help – particularly in [the area] of high pin count packages and high-end silicon." "So, our goal here at Rio is to empower the chip designers with a low-cost silicon solution that builds the package right into the design optimization. Right now, the chip design tools which are commercially available don't look into the package." "However, any die or silicon that goes into a package has to talk to the outside. If those outside behaviors are not taken into consideration, the product is not functional. Right now the trend in the industry is to augment at the board level – if it takes a couple of iterations at that point, it's okay. People know they'll get things fixed on the back end in a second or third pass, while also including enough guardbanding in the design to hopefully make things work." "But, going forward – with higher integration and higher pin counts – there's going to be even more pressure on time to delivery. There will not be the luxury of even a second-pass at production. We believe chip designers should be empowered – with very little effort on their part – to learn a few things about the package in the process of designing their chip. That way the chip will be designed better and things will pass through without the need for multiple iterations. They will have access to first flow success from chip to package." "So that's the situation from the technical point of view – we see the need and intend to meet it. However, from a start-up point of view, I personally wanted to build the team as well as the technology. That's a different perspective from many start-ups which are purely product driven. We believe that Rio as a company is more than purely product driven, because we see ourselves as being 'people driven' as well." "When the product is your only concern in a start-up, you don't really care what happens to the people. But I wanted to enjoy the process of creating a work environment in a start-up which is very caring – that's nurturing, compassionate and creative enough that it fosters the creativity of its people. I believe that employees should be allowed to criticize how a company is being developed – and that's certainly a different attitude than in many start-ups." "I think it's working because, right now the people who are with us here would not go anywhere else. If I were to start again, they would all come with me. Everyone one who comes to work here – like employees everywhere – bring some personal issues with them. But we do not see that as a problem, which is why everyone loves to come to work. [In fact], they come to work at odd times and work long hours. I don't need to motivate them to do that – it's the environment here that motivates them. They know that what we're working on here will be the most innovative solutions in the industry. They also know we're not trying to work hard here, but to work smart." "I believe that an individual has four wheels in life. One is a career – what someone wants to do for a profession. One is family – how the family grows and develops. Another is someone's own individual growth from a maturity point of view. The fourth wheel is the society around a person – what the person does to contribute to society." "If any of those wheels is smaller or bigger, you may feel temporarily that things are going smoothly, but without a truly balanced approach, you won't receive the greatest fulfillment out of all the various aspects of life." ************************************ Money matters * Ansoft Corp. announced financial results for its second quarter of fiscal 2006 ended October 31, 2005.
Per the Press Release: "Sales in the first nine months of 2005 increased by EUR 14.3 million to EUR 119.6 million in comparison to the same period last year. This translates into a growth rate of 13.6%. The operating income for the first three quarters increased by EUR 3.1 million to EUR 8.4 million. The net income for this period was EUR 8.8 million, up from EUR 6.1 million for the same period last year. X-FAB expects sales of more than EUR 160 million for the year 2005. This increase of more than 12.5% compared to the previous year significantly exceeds industry average forecasts. The company also expects a significantly improved operating result compared to fiscal year 2004." ************************************ New reps * EVE (Emulation and Verification Engineering) announced a distribution agreement with Itochu Techno-Science Corp. (CTC) in Japan. Hideki Negishi , General Manager of the PLM System Division of CTC, is impressed: "Hardware-assisted verification is becoming a must have in Japan due to the dramatic swell in design sizes and the explosive growth of embedded software. EVE’s emulation platforms are setting a new trend in the industry with unmatched performance and unbeatable price. We have been impressed by EVE’s innovative technology and rapidly increasing customers’ successes."
Takashi Tsumori, President and CEO of Innotech, is bullish on structured ASICs: "Forming this relationship with eASIC is of significant value to Innotech as we foresee a major market opportunity for Structured ASICs in Japan. eASIC's breakthrough products provide design flexibility and fast turnaround at extremely affordable prices for volume production. Our corporate goal is to collaborate with innovative companies such as eASIC and help to expand their market presence in Japan. Innotech is excited to be a partner with eASIC as the two companies can together provide the Japanese custom logic market the much needed capability to once again stimulate customer innovation."
Arie Maimon, GAL CEO, endorses Telairity: "Telairity is coming to market with a compelling solution for real-time HD encoding that gives designers the highest DSP price/performance, the highest level of integration, and the most flexibility available on the market today." ************************************ Joining up * Nallatech announced that Rave Computer Association, Inc. has joined Nallatech's Channel Partner Program. Rave is Nallatech’s "preferred" integration services partner in North America.. Rick Darter, President and CEO at Rave, says they're ready: "Rave is ready to bring support and integration capabilities to Nallatech and their partners. With our experience we are confident we can support that channel and help satisfy all the development needs for whole system installations. We look forward to working with Nallatech, helping to fulfill their vision for reconfigurable computing and delivering industry-specific support services." Ed Hennessy, Vice President for North American Operations at Nallatech, says they're also ready: "Nallatech’s collaboration with Rave will support our shared goals for delivering whole COTS solutions and services to our partners and customers in various high-performance embedded and server-based market segments. The combination of Rave and Nallatech will create subsystems that are certified for military and defense use and ready for full deployment."
Per the Press Release: "Ponte's technology will be made available royalty-free to Si2 and DTMC members for standardization purposes, including modification and benchmarking for the next 3 years. While Ponte retains full rights and ownership of the platform, should the technology be adopted, as is or as modified, as a standard by Si2, then it will be available to Si2 royalty free." Steve Schulz, President of Si2, says welcome aboard: "Ponte's technology, integrated with widely used physical design tools, provides compelling solution for designers anticipating hitting the proverbial DFM wall." No crash dummies here!
SPIRIT Chair Ralph von Vignau says folks are excited: "The SPIRIT Consortium is excited to welcome its new members. They, along with our other members, will be influential in guiding future developments and ensuring comprehensive validation of the specifications in real design flows. With the addition of these respected companies, the SPIRIT Consortium now lists 38 leading IP, system integration, and EDA companies as members." Chekib Akrout, Vice President for Design Technology at Freescale, references metadata: "The SPIRIT Consortium’s IP metadata descriptions complement the metadata already in use within Freescale, The SPIRIT Consortium enables an open industry metadata standard that will help facilitate data exchange with our partners and streamline our IP integration procedures." Albert Stritter, Vice President for Design Automation at Infineon, references enablement: "An efficient employment of IP modules is based on a tool automation that in turn requires standards for IP packaging. The specifications developed by The SPIRIT Consortium are seen as a key enabler to accomplish this. Hence, joining The Consortium is a natural expansion of Infineon’s design strategy, Infineon views IP-based design, at both the RTL level as well as at the transaction level, to be the most promising strategy to obtain demanded productivity improvement and design time reduction without any loss of product quality." Peter Hutton, Senior Vice President and General Manager of SoC Engineering at ARC, references cores: "Using ARC’s ARChitect Processor Configurator tool, an SoC designer can rapidly create a customized ARC processor core optimized for their application. Using the standard methods of IP description which The SPIRIT Consortium is driving to help link ARChitect to the SoC design flow will provide significant benefits for our customers." Silvano Motto, CEO of Yogitech, references catalogues: "We have been looking with much interest to the activity carried out in The Spirit Consortium during the last couple of years and we are now very excited and proud to become a member. We are looking forward to bringing into the consortium our strong expertise in the implementation and licensing of verification components; but, on top of it, we are also strongly motivated to apply the consortium specifications to a new IP catalogue we are developing and that will be made available during 2006 specifically to safety critical applications."
Per the Press Release, "As part of the Tensilica Xtensions Network design center members have been authorized to assist Xtensa licensees with the configuration, implementation and evaluation SoC designs." Madhukar Dev, CEO at Tata Elxsi, is ready to turn the key: "The partnership reflects our intent to support product development services with technologies that enable significant performance benefits and faster time-to-market across various verticals. Our turnkey SoC design capability and proven strengths in DSP and networking, coupled with Xtensa processor expertise, will help customers in the consumer electronics, multimedia and networking markets reduce product life cycle time and development costs." Larry Przywara, Director of Strategic Alliances for Tensilica, is pleased as well: "As an established embedded design company with an international set of customers, we're very pleased that Tata Elxsi decided to join our partner network and provide Xtensa design services to its customers/ Having met Tensilica's high standards for an authorized design center, Tata Elxsi will now play a significant role in ensuring the broad and rapid proliferation of Xtensa cores in embedded applications." ************************************ New Business Cards * Canada's CMC Microsystems announced that Dan Gale has been appointed CTO, in addition to his role as Vice President. Per the Press Release: " With over 20 years of experience with CMC, Mr. Gale has developed internationally-recognized programs that enable university researchers to exploit leading-edge technologies for microsystems research and technology development. He has facilitated Canada’s distinguished participation in the global microsystems arena through his leadership in national initiatives such as Canada’s System-on-Chip Research Network and the National Microelectronics and Photonics Testing Collaboratory."
Per the Press Release: "Lloyd, Aparin, Abidi and Lee all bring many years of RFIC design experience to the Technical Advisory Board. Additionally, Lee and Abidi are focused on next-generation architectures that will fuel wireless communications in the years to come. Their diverse backgrounds will bring unique insight to Xpedion." ************************************ VDEC & STARC Sonics Inc. announced a licensing agreement with the VLSI Design and Education Center (VDEC) of the University of Tokyo for Sonics’ SMART Interconnects. Per the Press Release: "VDEC is chartered to improve education, awareness and advancements in VLSI design and chip fabrication at national, public, and private universities and colleges in Japan. VDEC also has on-going research collaborations with the Japanese-based Semiconductor Technology Academic Research Center (STARC) to promote the development and education of semiconductor IP reuse … One of the ways VDEC promotes the education of VLSI design in Japan is by providing a VLSI chip fabrication environment. This consists of a platform-based design environment with on-chip test facilities, as well as an IP-reuse design methodology." Kunihiro Asada, Director of VDEC, is quoted in the Press Release: "Our funding base clearly indicates that as they transform their SoC architectures to a platform strategy, VDEC should dedicate time and resources to help them better utilize the Sonics SMART Interconnects into their platform design flows." ************************************ Three from EEMBC & Friends * The Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) announced plans to develop a new suite of benchmark tests that the consortium says will be "the first of their kind in the network storage industry to help predict the performance of CPU subsystems in storage applications such as network attached storage (NAS), storage area networks (SANs), virtual tape libraries (VTLs), and direct attached storage (DAS) RAID systems." EEMBC says David Solina, Principal Engineer at Adaptec and an expert in RAID architecture and performance, will be Chair of the new subcommittee to oversee the development of the benchmarks. Solina is quoted on the Press Release: "Based on its success in developing several respected benchmark suites, EEMBC represents the best opportunity for storage systems builders to obtain the benchmarks they need in order to design, develop, and deliver reliable, high-performing systems for their customers. EEMBC has the process and structure to bring together all interested parties, and the Consortium's commitment to developing only fully certifiable benchmarks means that vendors can rely with confidence on the resulting benchmark scores. I am very pleased to be chairing this committee and helping to create a tool that I believe will help manufacturers take the design of their storage systems to a whole new level."
Per the organizers, "The new group is an outgrowth of meetings among chip vendors, semiconductor IP providers, as well as RTOS, compiler, and development-tool vendors that have been ongoing since May. Its focus will be on nonproprietary implementations where products from multiple vendors must work together. The group has set its initial focus on multitasking and communications application program interfaces (APIs) and debug, with the goal of eventually providing a forum in which all relevant embedded multi-core standardization issues can be discussed and resolved." Tomas Evensen, CTO at Wind River, says the wheel's already been invented: "The Multicore Association provides a place for the device industry players to come together and find standard ways of interoperating in the multi-core arena. This is a win for both the vendors and the customers, as everybody can focus on adding value on top of the standards instead of reinventing the wheel." EEMBC's Markus Levy adds: "Ultimately, our goal is to help our participants' customers achieve quicker time to market, and part of this is giving our adopters the ability to certify to their customers that their products are compatible with standards set by The Multicore Association. As multi-core becomes more prevalent and more vendors are working together to create solutions, the need for industry-standard approaches to interfaces, tools, and other challenging technical issues is becoming more urgent and will become increasingly relevant as multi-core implementations find their way into a larger set of applications."
Markus Levy has the last word: " In some ways this is a major departure for EEMBC. Until now, any commercial enterprise that wanted to use the Consortium's benchmarks could do so only by becoming an EEMBC member. However, the licensing model has quite a successful precedent in EEMBC U, under which faculty members at universities and colleges are entitled to license the benchmark source code for teaching and research purposes. We are continuing, moreover, to add to our membership with processor vendors and OEMs who want to be in a position to influence the development of EEMBC's next-generation benchmarks and to use benchmark scores for both product development and marketing purposes … With this new program, we are further providing an industry-standard alternative to the proprietary benchmarks that are now in use." ************************************ Night at the Opera Per Magma Press Release on October 19, 2005 – Synopsys' recent claims of patent infringement against Magma Design Automation not only rely on patents that are invalid but also constitute a violation of United States antitrust law, Magma asserted in a court filing today. Magma, in reply to Synopsys' Sept. 26 lawsuit, filed an answer to complaint and counterclaims disputing Synopsys' claims on the basis that the applications Synopsys made to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office knowingly concealed relevant prior art that described the inventions claimed in the applications. Magma's counterclaim asserts that not only is the existence of this prior art a basis for rendering patents invalid, but that to knowingly exclude relevant prior art from an application to the U.S. PTO constitutes a fraudulent application, and that Synopsys' Sept. 26 lawsuit against Magma was therefore an attempt to enforce a fraudulently obtained patent and constitutes a violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Among the assertions in its filing today, Magma stated that Synopsys' failure to cite prior art resulted in the unenforceability of two of the patents – patent 6,434,733 (the '733 patent) and patent 6,766,501 (the '501 patent) – at issue in its Sept. 26 lawsuit. At the 1996 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers VLSI Test Symposium, a paper entitled "Scan Insertion Criteria for Low Design Impact" was presented. Synopsys became aware of this paper while processing a related patent application. Despite the clear materiality of this paper to the '733 patent application, and later the '501 patent application, Synopsys failed to alert the U.S. PTO while it was processing the '733 and '501 patent applications. As Magma asserted in its filing today, this was a clear violation of Synopsys' duty of good faith and candor, and all claims of these patents are therefore unenforceable. Magma's filing asserts that Synopsys' anticompetitive practices have increased the already high barriers to entry facing competitors in the relevant markets -- in this case, markets addressed by the '733 and '501 patents. Data published by Gartner Dataquest indicates Synopsys enjoys 91 percent market shares in both these markets. In a Sept. 17, 2004 lawsuit, Synopsys claimed infringement of its patent 6,378,114 (the '114 patent), a patent whose application failed to cite relevant prior art. After the existence of this prior art became known, the U.S. PTO agreed last month to re-examine the validity of the '114 patent. The U.S. PTO, in its ruling on the '114 re-examination, stated, "Accordingly, a substantial new issue of patentability, which has not been previously addressed, has been raised by the submission of the aforementioned references," and "All claims are subject to re-examination.'" The '733 and '501 patents relate to scan re-ordering. The third patent at issue in the lawsuit Synopsys filed Sept. 26 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, patent 6,192,508 (the '508 patent), relates to improving timing and congestion in integrated circuit design and reflects methods specific to Monterey Design Systems' products. (Synopsys acquired certain assets of Monterey, including patents, in 2004). The reply Magma filed today asserts that Magma does not infringe, contributorily infringe, or induce infringement of the '508 patent. In a separate action, Magma has requested that a claim of unfair competition, filed by Synopsys in Santa Clara County Superior Court on Sept. 26, be transferred to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where the companies' initial patent dispute is being tried. Could Groucho and Zeppo sort this out? ************************************ Ending on a happier note … * DATE 2006 will be in Munich again in 2006 from March 6th to the 10th. Conference organizers says they have received an "all-time record number of submissions" for the conference program, and that the 350 members of the Technical Program Committee, chaired by Professor Donatella Scuito, have their work cut out for them. They're going to have to sort through the 839 submissions to determine which papers will be accepted for presentation in Munich. Papers have arrived for review from 40+ countries on 5 continents. Please note: The General Chair for DATE 2006 is Professor Georges Gielen from the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Belgium * DAC 2006 will be happening July 24th to the 28th in San Francisco. Plan on being there, but first plan on submitting an abstract for a paper, panel, special session or tutorial because the DAC Program Committee also wants to get to work reviewing submissions . Actually, it's too late for special sessions, panels and tutorials – but regular paper submissions have until December 19th at 5 PM. There's still time if you're so inclined. |