************************

New players

* Gradient Design Automation Inc. announced the company and a "strategy to deliver thermal integrity to IC designs for portable devices, high-end graphics processors, automotive electronics, and memories such as DRAM and Flash." Gradient received its Series A funding from Alloy Ventures, Cadence, and Lanza TechVentures in November 2003. The company has just announced its first product, FireBolt, this month. The company has already announced its first products. (see June 21st EDA Confidential)

Robert Johnson is Gradient Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Previously, he was Executive Vice President at Barcelona Design and Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Tality (that was Cadence, remember?).

Rajit Chandra is President and CEO at the company - he founded Gradient in 2003. Previously, he was Vice President of Technology at Magma Design Automation, and the founder of Moscape, which was acquired by Magma in 2000. Prior to Moscape, Chandra was at Cadence, where he developed the Central Delay Calculator, and the industry standard delay format (SDF). He began his career as a performance verification lead in the microprocessor design team at Intel.

Recently, I had a chance to speak by phone with Rajit about his company:

"We announced our first product at DAC. We're probably ahead of the game in terms of the competition, because at DAC it became quite clear that we're the only people who are solving problems related to the heat and temperature issues on the chip."

"As you know, Intel and other companies have recently announced temperature-related problems that have caused their chips to be late - problems linked to thermal issues on the chip. Traditionally, these problems have been at the board level, but now they've moved down to the chip level."

"Our tool takes the power consumed by a chip and the power driven by the devices on the chip, it takes the lay-out information - floorplaning details or details of the fully placed-and-routed design - plus the package characteristics and data regarding the libraries and the leakage power, and with all that, we're able to completely map the temperature within the chip - quite literally everywhere. Every substrate, every metal layer, etc. Then, we're able to tell the designer what changes there would be in the electrical behavior of the chip itself [due to temperature gradients]. Our main goal is to tell designers what the temperatures would be everywhere on the chip."

"All of this is important because for the first time, temperature is driving power - there's a new and extraordinarily strong interdependence here. The temperature is actually affecting leakage power, with more and more preponderance at nanometer-scaled design."

******************************

New business partners

* Arithmatica, Inc. says it has expanded its sales network in the U.S. and Taiwan through relationships with The LogicWorks and 2APAC. The company says LogicWorks serves as a specialized sales channel partner for emerging IP companies. 2APAC is a Technical Marketing and Program Management company specialized in bringing IP, Digital Media and Wireless solutito companies in the Asia Pacific region.

******************************

New business cards

* DesignAdvance Systems, Inc. announced that Howard Coltin has been named Vice President of Sales. Coltin has 17+ years' sales and management experience with EDA and CAD companies. Most recently, he was Vice President of Sales for VeSys Ltd. (now part of Mentor Graphics Corp.). Coltin also co-founded Linius Technologies (now part of Autodesk) where he served as Vice President and also President & CEO. He has a BS in EE & CS from Northeastern University in Boston.

* Elliptic Semiconductor announced that Howard Pakosh has been appointed to the company's Board of Directors. Pakosh has 24 years' experience in semiconductor sales and marketing. He is currently Global Manager for the COT/Fabless division at Virage Logic. Previously, he was a director at Magma Design Automation. Pakosh helped co-found Xentec (sold to InSilicon in December 2000 and now part of Synopsys). Prior to joining Xentec, he was Canadian District Manager at Synopsys and worked at T.E.A.M. Corp. (acquired by OrCAD and now part of Cadence). [Are you following this?] Pakosh has a BSEE from George Brown College in Toronto, Ontario.

* Mentor Graphics Corp. announced that Paul Hofstadler, former CEO and Founder of 360Bridge Corporation, has been appointed to the position of Vice President of Worldwide Consulting. Hofstadler has 20+ years' EDA services, sales and marketing experience. Previously, he held senior management positions at Silicon Metrics and Xynetix Design Systems, and was employed by Mentor Graphics once before from 1988 to 1995 as consulting manager, and then director of European professional services. Hofstadler started his career at Sandia National Laboratories. He has a BSEE from the University of New Mexico and an MSEE from the University of Arizona.

* Open-Silicon, Inc. announced that Robert Gargus has been named CFO for the company. Most recently, Gargus was CFO at Silicon Image. Prior to that, he was the President and CEO of Telcom Semiconductor, and has held executive positions at Tandem Computers. Gargus has a BS in Accounting from the University of Detroit and an MBA in Finance.

******************************

New offices

* EVE (Emulation and Verification Engineering) announced that it has opened an office in Korea that will be known as EVE Korea Inc., headed by Young-Bin Cho who most recently worked for KT Design Technology as sales and marketing director.

Luc Burgun, EVE CEO and President, is bullish on the Korean market for EDA: "With its push into the digital media, telecommunications and mobile communications markets, Korea presents a tremendous opportunity. Korean designers are searching for a proven hardware-assisted verification platform such as ZeBu for their SoC designs."