The IEEE Technical Activities Board has endorsed the formation a new IEEE Council for Electronic Design Automation (C-EDA), with final approval expected in June.

Per the Press Release: "The council will become the focal point for IEEE’s multiple EDA disciplines, bringing increased value to its members by coordinating EDA activities and offering a way to enable new initiatives. It also will pursue an aggressive policy to recruit young talent to EDA."

"The Council on Electronic Design Automation (EDA) –– C-EDA –– is an organization being formed within the IEEE to act as a focal point for its multiple EDA disciplines. Its goal is to bring increased value to IEEE members by coordinating EDA activities, enabling new initiatives, fostering interdisciplinary research and recruiting young talent to EDA. It also will increase visibility for IEEE-sponsored EDA events such as the Design Automation Conference (DAC) and International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD) and its technical publications. Its charter spans theory, implementation and use of computer aided design (CAD) tools to design integrated electronic circuits and systems."

"Five IEEE societies have agreed to join the council:

* Antennas and Propagation Society
* Circuits and Systems Society
* Computer Society
* Electron Devices Society
* Solid State Circuits Society

"C-EDA’s charter spans theory, implementation and use of computer aided design (CAD) tools to design integrated electronic circuits and systems. This includes tools that automate all levels of the design, analysis and verification of hardware and embedded software up to complete working systems. C-EDA will further increase visibility for IEEE-sponsored EDA events such as the Design Automation Conference (DAC) and International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD) and its technical publications that feature EDA."

"Previously, EDA-related activities were spread among various IEEE societies with little coordination. [Now], a committee of technical leaders from industry and academia initially will manage C-EDA’s activities. It will be led by Al Dunlop, past DAC chair, a design consultant, and a member of the Board of Governors for the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society that unanimously endorsed the committee formation in May 2004. The IEEE Circuits and Systems Society is home of the CAD journal and the Design Automation Conference within IEEE, and many of its members are involved in CAD and are strong supporters of the C-EDA Council initiative. Final approval by the IEEE Technical Advisory Board and its Board of Directors is expected in June. "

Al Dunlop is quoted: "A council on EDA is an imperative as a broader set of disciplines becomes necessary to design future circuits. It used to be possible to design logic circuits without much attention to issues such as power or crosstalk. Now device and substrate issues must be an integral part of the design tools, while software and embedded systems play a major role in SoC [design]."

Giovanni De Micheli, former IEEE Circuits and Systems Society President and Director of the Integrated Systems Centre at EPF Lausanne in Switzerland, is quoted in the Press Release: "The council is a major step toward realizing that EDA is a key technology for the semiconductor and systems sector. This technology needs to be nurtured by fostering interdisciplinary research and by exposing its results to young engineers whose presence in this field is necessary for the overall growth of the electronics industry."

Georges Gielen, President of IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, and Full Professor of EE at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, is quoted: "The expectation is that the Circuit and Systems Society through these CAD members continues to support the EDA activities, a field that is now getting a more focused attention within IEEE through this council."

Al told me, "A group of us have gotten together to form this IEEE Council for EDA made up of the 5 societies listed. Historically, IEEE has had a lot of CAD activities, but they were dispersed across the various societies. However, new algorithms are needed to solve [the many technical problems facing the industry today]. The faster the industry moves toward developing those algorithms – a process that requires sophisticated computer science and electrical engineering – the faster progress will be made in the industry."

"The council will have representatives from industry and academics. What we all want to do is to attract really bright young people into the CAD area and we felt this council will help encourage these young researchers to work at the forefront of CAD and design. We've got to make CAD into a good, fun, and interesting environment – we want to get the very best of the academic world and encourage them to participate in the EDA problems and the EDA companies."

"We're not yet at a point where we can discuss a tangible agenda, but with our team that's half industry and half academia – we hope to give the whole CAD industry a rebirth that will re-energize the entire community."

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

** Anadigm and Nu Horizons Electronics Corp. announced that they have entered a global distribution agreement under which Nu Horizons will distribute the full line of Anadigm's field programmable analog arrays (FPAAs) throughout North and South America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region.

Dave Bowers, President of Nu Horizons Semiconductor Division, is quoted: "In distributing Anadigm's products, we are adding another dimension to our extensive experience in analog and field programmable technologies, and a new category of advanced solutions that will help our customers bring leadership products to market."

** Cadence Design Systems, Inc. announced that it has completed the acquisition of Verisity, Ltd. Under the terms of the agreement, Cadence has acquired Verisity in an all-cash transaction for approximately $315 million. Verisity stockholders will receive $12 in cash in exchange for each outstanding share of Verisity stock. Former Verisity President and CEO Moshe Gavrielov will now head the combined Cadence/Verisity verification operation as Executive Vice President of the newly formed Cadence Verification Division. Yoav Hollander, Founder of Verisity, becomes the Verification Division CTO. Along with Hollander, both Christopher Tice, Cadence Senior Vice President and General Manager, and Mitch Weaver, Vice President of the Cadence Incisive Platform, will now report to Gavrielov.

Mike Fister, Cadence president and CEO, is quoted: "The combination of the Cadence and Verisity verification products, engineering, marketing, sales and support teams provides our customers with an unparalleled range of verification solutions. Our combined capabilities will enable customers to attack their most challenging design-verification problems, from planning to closure, in an automated and integrated manner."

** eASIC Corp. announced that it has secured $7.5 million in equity financing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Vinod Khosla. Per the Press Release: "As follow-on to the previous investment of $5 Million on May 2004, this additional venture capital funding is a vote of confidence in the company’s breakthrough technology and fast growth. The funding will be used to expand the company’s global operations, including marketing and sales and develop the next generation configurable logic and Structured ASIC products in 65nm."

Zvi Or-Bach, eASIC Founder and CEO, is quoted: "Receiving this second funding from KPCB and Vinod Khosla is a huge achievement for eASIC and the best vote of confidence from one of the leading and most successful venture capitalist firms. This is an extremely important stage as we plan the launch of our first NRE-free Structured ASIC arrays together with our strategic partners…The funding from KPCB and Vinod Khosla will help us execute on providing our customers with the ultimate configurable logic solution."

Vinod Khosla, Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is also quoted: "Kleiner Perkins is inclined to invest in companies who can instigate a disruptive innovation change and lead a major main-stream market segment. eASIC’s technology ushers in a new era of what we call Standard Metal. This displaces standard cell, which is no longer a viable solution for mainstream use in the custom logic market. This funding will help the company achieve its next milestones and prepare for its next phase of rapid growth".

** Electronics Workbench Corp., a National Instruments company, announced the establishment of a direct sales and technical support office in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The company says its Brazilian operations will feature "dedicated employees and other resources that will allow the company to better serve the needs of both professional and educational users in this important and growing market. Sales and support will be provided in the native Portuguese language and numerous local events are planned to support the user base."

** Emulation and Verification Engineering (EVE) has named Alternative Solutions (Alt-S) its distributor in Eastern Europe. Alternative Solutions has offices in France in Russia, and will market and support EVE’s products throughout Eastern Europe, Russia and the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union.

Wieslaw Paprocki, Managing Director of Alternative Solutions in France, is quoted: "We’re seeing more design starts in Eastern Europe, all with increasing complexity in hardware and embedded software. We believe that EVE’s ZeBu will meet the demand for fast and affordable verification solutions because of its superior price/performance ratio and ease of use."

** HARDI Electronics announced it has added three sales representatives in the U.S. Mission Technology will serve as the company’s exclusive sales representative in Southern California, Exis will be the exclusive rep in northern California, and Reptronix will be exclusive to the Arizona and New Mexico territories.

Lars-Eric Lundgren, CEO at HARDI, is quoted: "Our recently announced HAPS-20 Rapid ASIC Prototyping Platform, with best-in-class flexibility, I/O connectivity, and speed are already being used by several Fortune 100 companies in North America, as well as industry leaders around the world. With the addition of these representatives we can help many more customers with the verification cycle of their ASIC designs."

** Mentor Graphics Corp. announced that the company's Precision synthesis tool will be integrated into two Xilinx Education Services courses for complex FPGA designs. Xilinx says it selected the Precision Synthesis tool because "the synthesis flow from Mentor Graphics is already tightly integrated into the Xilinx ISE design environment. Precision Synthesis also has the functionality and capabilities needed to explain the complex FPGA design concepts presented at these advanced classes."

"Both of the training courses, entitled Designing for Performance and the Advanced FPGA Implementation, focus on advanced FPGA techniques for challenging design situations. The first class teaches students how to fit their designs into smaller FPGAs or lower speed grades, thus helping them create more efficient designs and reducing their overall system cost. Topics in the second class include ways to manually place logic, as well as creating and editing timing constraints, among others. Students also learn how to take advantage of the clock resources of the Virtex and Spartan families of devices, with their efficient clocking schemes." Nice.

** Nassda Corp. announced it will "adjourn" its annual meeting of stockholders when it is held on April 8, 2005 and reconvene it to act upon the matters set forth in Nassda's proxy materials dated March 10, 2005 on April 27, 2005 at the company's corporate executive offices in Santa Clara.

The Press Release says, "This announcement follows the announcement by Nassda on December 1, 2004 that Nassda and Synopsys had entered into a merger agreement providing for the acquisition of Nassda by Synopsys in an all cash transaction at $7.00 per share and, subject to the closing of the acquisition, to settle all outstanding litigation by Synopsys against Nassda and certain Nassda officers, directors and employees. The proposal to approve the merger agreement, among other things, will be acted upon by the Nassda stockholders when the annual meeting is reconvened on April 27, 2005."

** Open Core Protocol International Partnership (OCP-IP) announced that Realtek Semiconductor Corp. has joined the organization. Realtek, located in Taiwan, is described as "one of the world's largest and most successful IC design houses." The organizations say that the addition of Realtek to the membership roster "adds to the tremendous support that OCP-IP has already enjoyed throughout Asia and adds to membership including Semiconductor Technology Academic Research Center (STARC), FueTrek, Yamaha, Governing Steering Committee member, Toshiba, Kawasaki, Zuken and several leading universities."

Realtek's Executive Vice President Jessy Chen, is quoted in the Press Release: "Our specialization is the ability to bring costs down on existing technologies while maintaining strong features and quality devices. Many of our techniques are patented and are used in our IP library, which is utilized throughout the organization. Using OCP in our ongoing R&D efforts rapidly brings new technologies into the Realtek product line resulting in a much shorter time to market."

** The Petrov Group announced its study titled "Trends in HW/SW Co-Design—User and Vendor Strategies" is now available. The company says the report "serves as a baseline for client-specific custom engagements, which are Petrov Group’s primary business. The report price is $2,950 and includes a follow-up teleconference."

Boris Petrov, Managing Partner of the Petrov Group, is quoted: "Integrated hardware and software design technology is the key ingredient required to exploit the emerging nanotechnology in a range of applications. The report extracts successful implementations from a sea of ad hoc published information. It defines the business potency of HW/SW co-design—from major solutions to exploratory projects in this important space. We would also like to announce that we will complete another major report titled 'Economics of the Electronic System-Level (ESL) Design Study.' It can be purchased at a significant pre-publication price reduction."

** Poseidon Design Systems announced Doug Fairbairn, Chairman of Verisity, will join Poseidon's Board of Directors. Cadence's acquisition of Verisity was completed on April 7th.

Poseidon CEO and President Ravi A. K. Janak, is quoted: "With the addition of Doug, we have brought one of the best talents in the industry to Poseidon’s Board. Doug’s experience as founder and senior executive of several semiconductor and EDA companies including, Verisity, VLSI Technology, Cadence, and Redwood Design Automation, help him bring an incomparable mix of entrepreneurial and technological knowledge of the semiconductor and EDA industries."

Fairbairn is also quoted: "Poseidon is a company that appears poised to change the competitive landscape of the ESL industry. Its innovative technology for the design exploration, hardware/software partitioning, and system optimization will help successfully create the electronic devices of the future. I am very pleased to be joining the Poseidon board at such an exciting time and I look forward to help the company leverage its technology leadership to become the leading provider of the ESL tools."

** ProDesign USA announced that it has joined the Synopsys in-Sync program to "improve the complete design flow between Synopsys Design Compiler FPGA (DC FPGA) synthesis software, the VCS comprehensive RTL verification solution and ProDesign CHIPit ASIC Rapid Prototyping and Emulation systems."

Joseph Rothman, Head of U.S. operations for ProDesign, is quoted: "We are working with Synopsys to optimize a unified ASIC Rapid Prototyping flow that maximizes the productivity of our mutual customers. By integrating with industry standard Synopsys DC FPGA and the VCS complete RTL verification solution, we offer customers significant benefits when they use our solution for fast prototyping. Using DC FPGA software in the CHIPit verification flow, our customers have seen tremendous reductions in the risk and time required to prototype and verify their ASIC designs."

Karen Bartleson, Director of Interoperability at Synopsys, is also quoted: "Together, Synopsys and ProDesign will cooperate to provide our mutual customers with the best quality of results in the shortest time possible as they prototype their complex SoCs. Additionally, it will allow our mutual customers to do real time early system software debug and check overall functionality, before committing to production ASIC."

** Sequence Design announced it has named D'gipro Design Automation & Marketing Pvt. Ltd. to be the company's distributor in India. Under the terms of the agreement, D’gipro will provide sales and support for Sequence’s complete line of chip-design software. D’gipro is headquartered in India’s high-tech hub of Bangalore, with additional offices in New Delhi and Hyderabad.

** SIGMA-C GmbH announced it has established a Tokyo office through its wholly owned subsidiary, SIGMA-C K.K. In addition, SIGMA-C announced that John Sachen will serve as the company's Japan Country Manager. It also announced a Japan Users Group meeting in Tokyo on Tuesday, April 12, 2005 that includes a free technical seminar for users and prospective users of lithography simulation.

Christian Kalus, CEO of SIGMA-C GmbH, is quoted in the Press Release: "Our new local presence in Japan lets us work directly with our customers in their native language. We are deeply committed to the Japanese market and look forward to enhancing our long-existing relationships with customers there. We are especially pleased to appoint John Sachen, well known veteran in the software development and solution market, as country manager. He brings more than 20 years of professional working experience in Japan to his new role, and he and his team have our full support for the Japanese market."

** SoftJin announced its first office in the U.S. The office will be in Santa Clara, and per the Press Release will "address the North American electronic industry’s need for new and customized EDA software development services and EDA tool building blocks." Nachiket Urdhwareshe, SoftJin CEO, is also quoted: "Our goal with respect to our new US office is to build on our past success... We picked California because of Silicon Valley and our growing customer base in this region."

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

** EDAC's Market Statistics Service (MSS) announced EDA's industry revenue for Q4 of 2004 was $1,078 million, a 3% increase over Q4 2003. For the full year 2004, revenue totaled a record $4,019 million, which was 3% more than $3911 million reported in 2003.

EDAC Chairman and Chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphics, Wally Rhines, is quoted in the Press Release: "In 2004, The EDA industry crossed the $4 billion mark," said "Every quarter saw consistent year over year growth for the whole industry, though the North American region, as well as the IC Physical Design & Verification segment, were both down for the year."

Here's a brief summary: Product and Maintenance revenue (excluding services) increased 3% over Q4 2003 and posted a record high quarter of $1,011 million revenue in Q4 2004. Reporting companies employed 20,962 professionals in Q4 2004, 10% more than Q4 2003. CAE generated revenue of $523 million in Q4 2004, 9% more than the same period in 2003. CAE revenue for all of 2004 totaled $1,919 million, a 5% increase over 2003. IC physical design and verification decreased 6% to $326 million in Q4 2004 over the same quarter in 2003. For the full year 2004, IC physical design and verification revenue totaled $1,165 million, a 4% decrease over 2003. Revenue for PCB and multi-chip module (MCM) layout totaled $91 million in Q4 2004, 9% greater than in Q4 2003. PCB and MCM layout revenue totaled $341 million for all of 2004, 3% above 2003. Semiconductor IP revenue totaled $71 million in Q4 2004, 2% less than Q4 2003. For 2004, SIP revenue increased to $314 million (versus $281 million in 2003) due in part to new company participation. EDA services revenue was $67 million in Q4 2004, up 5% from Q4 2003. Services revenue totaled $280 million in 2004, a 12% increase over 2003.

North America, EDA’s largest customer base, purchased $494 million of EDA products and services in Q4 2004, a 14% decline from Q4 2003. For all of 2004, North American revenue was $1,950 million (49% global share), 4% less than 2003. North America was the only region to decline for the quarter and for the year. Western Europe led all regions for revenue growth in Q4 2004, increasing by 33% over Q4 2003 to reach $268 million. For the full year 2004, revenue from Western Europe was $820 million, a 12% increase over 2003, making Western Europe the second largest EDA market and 20% of global revenue in 2004.

In Q4, revenue from Japan grew 14% to $188 million. In 2004 Japan increased 2% over 2003 revenue to reach $783 million in 2004 – a new record for the region. EDA sales in Japan constituted 19% of the global total in 2004. The rest of the world (ROW) continued to extend previous years of revenue growth by increasing 23% to $128 million in Q4 2004. Revenue from ROW led all regions for revenue growth for the full year 2004 with an increase of 22% over 2003 to $466 million (12% of global 2004 revenue).

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

"After an almost three year legal battle, ZF Micro Solutions has entered into a settlement with National Semiconductor Corp. ZF now has all of its intellectual property and has received a confidential amount of cash with which ZF can now rebuild and bring the ZFx86 FailSafe PC-on-a-Chip back into production as quickly as possible. The ZFx86 will once again be produced exclusively by ZF Micro Solutions."

"When we heard the news that that the dispute had been settled, we immediately placed an order with ZF and notified our customer base that we will be able to continue building our ZFx86-based products" said Doug Stead, President of Tri-M Systems, Inc. "Even though three years have passed, no one in the industry has been able to come close to offering what the ZF chip can do and we’re elated that we can now expand into new markets."