( ESNUG 528 Item 5 ) -------------------------------------------- [10/23/13]
Subject: News & Rumors on BDA, Spectre, TSMC, ClioSoft, Nimbic, AMD, Dini
HAVE A HAPPY HALLOWEEN: Here's the latest news & rumors I've heard about EDA
and fabs. Feel free to comment/correct/scold anything!
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- For fun, I looked up the two O'Melveny & Myers lawyers defending
BDA from the Cadence lawsuit. One's a DMCA expert named a top
75 IP lawyer in California in 2010 and 2011. The other defended
Avanti against Cadence in 2002 -- and he even put Joe Costello on
the stand! They're sharks! Looks like BDA CEO Ravi Subramanian
isn't fooling around at all on this lawsuit. Whoa!
On the tech side, Cadence announced Spectre XPS, which they claim
is "10X faster with 1/3 the memory use". The Cadence marketing
folk have been showing the old school EDA press (along with their
paid EDA marketing bloggers) a powerpoint sales pitch with an SRAM
benchmark of Spectre XPS vs. a "Brand X" fast SPICE simulator.
One of my spies reported:
"Notice that Spectre XPS is in Cadence red, and that
Brand X is colored Berkeley Design orange!"
While a different spy said: "Brand X is Synopsys Magma FineSim."
Inquiring minds want to know which spy is right??? :)
SIDE NOTE: TSMC OIP had only Synopsys and BDA fast SPICE as "ready"
for 16 nm -- but with CDNS Spectre XPS was NOT 16 nm ready. Oops.
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- Speaking of clouds, Nimbic, Inc. was granted US Patent 8271240
last year. "Secure Cloud-Based Electronic Design Automation".
In dense legalese, I can't tell if it's for a new SPICE algorithm
or if it's a patent for doing SPICE runs on a secure cloud... ???
And will Aart/Lip-Bu/Wally now have to pay Raul Camposano for
permission to run their own SPICE on their own clouds now?
And does this patent zap companies using SPICE-with-clouds, too?
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Congrats TSMC for posting record 3Q'13 revenues up 14.8% as compared
to 3Q'12. Profits up 5.2%, too! Bravo!
Downsides are: Wall Street Journal reports that in July the TSMC CEO
warned 4Q'13 revenues will be down 10.5% vs. 3Q as "global inventory
piles up", Fudzilla reports:
"Intel has 22 nm and demos 14 nm chips, while the competition
lead by TSMC is still struggling to get 20 nm to market. ...
By the time TSMC gets to 20 nm, Intel will be doing 14 nm and
it seems Intel is at least a year ahead of the competition."
- Fuad Abazovic, (Fudzilla 09/18/13)
(But to be fair, tried-and-true killer Design Enablement is the big
counter-punch TSMC has. Intel's a newbie at taking in non-Intel
customer designs to fab. A painful learning curve is coming there!)
Apple rumors say that although TSMC got the 20 nm A8 order:
"Samsung Electronics will supply 14 nm A9 chips that will be
used for Apple's iPhone 7. ... Samsung Electronics developed
state-of-the-art 14 nm models ahead of its rival TSMC,
regaining the order from Apple."
- Korea Economic Daily (07/15/13)
Also, TSMC CEO Morris Chang is retiring for a 2nd time. Hopefully he
won't have to come back to save the company a 3rd time. :)
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- FUN FACTS:
CDNlive India Customer Attendance
2008: ##################### 681
2009: #################### 646
2010: ################# 571
2011: ################## 594
2012: ########################## 872
2013: ################################## 1,134 <-- +30% YoY
CDNlive India 2013 was held in Bangalore. The new Palladium XP II
was such a big draw this year, they added a 2nd day just for it.
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- Barracuda Networks filed an S-1 to IPO. Since Dean Drako, CEO of
IC Manage, happens to own 27.5 M Barracuda shares, it's ironic
that one of the richest guys in EDA made his money outside of EDA.
"Show me the money!"
- from the 1996 film Jerry Maguire
On a more spiritual path, EDN.com recently did a story about how
5 atomic physics research institutes used ClioSoft SOS to do their
US-and-Europe Virtuoso/Calibre/EDI data management to design the
chips inside the CERN Large Hadron Collider -- that's searching for
the Higgs-Boson "God" particle. With this in mind, I have to give
a big "Ohhmmmmm...." to Srinath Anantharaman, CEO of ClioSoft. :)
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- FUN QUOTE
"The theater between us stopped 18 months ago. Icahn
bought in at $8. MENT is now $19. Our earnings have
exploded, ~20 percent operating income. It's all good."
- Joe Sawicki at DAC'13 on Carl Icahn and MENT
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- Although Simon Segars, CEO of ARM, was given a birthday cake at the
Oct. 16th EDAC EDA Reunion, my spies say that he was actually born
in England on Oct. 17th -- i.e. it was a fake birthday! BUSTED!!!
I contacted Simon directly about this. His reply:
"It was nice to celebrate my birthday early with my friends
in the EDA industry. The Queen has two birthdays, so why
shouldn't everyone?"
Queen? TWO birthdays?? Googled it. Simon was right. The Queen's
real birthday is on April 21 -- but her "official birthday" is
celebrated on the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd Saturday in June in the UK.
YEA! It's serious cutting-edge investigative journalism like this
that I want to keep DeepChip know for! Yea! :)
P.S. In Q3'13, ARM sold a record 48 licenses to 24 companies, with
total revenues up 26%, and shipped 2.5 B units, up 14% YoY.
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- No breaking news on the SNPS suing ATOP front, but the rumor is
Atoptech stole Samsung SARC (Austin) from Synopsys IC Compiler
for some unknown $$$. This is the Samsung group that does CPU's,
GPU's, and ARM cores. I'm betting Aart is furious! If anyone
knows what the $$$ was and for how many years, please email me.
The recent TSMC OIP had slides of ATOP next to SNPS/CDN/MENT for
16 nm P&R tools as "ready". (Again Aart not happy.)
But for EM/IR drop, only Cadence has 16 nm rule compliance and
accuracy for both gate and transistors. Apache and SNPS can't
do EM accuracy. (Yay Lip-Bu! Sorry Andrew and Aart.)
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- What's up at GlobalFoundries? After 22 months on the job as their
SVP of both sales and marketing, Mike Noonen steps down. And now
rumor is Ana Hunter, the 7 year senior VP of foundry services for
Samsung Semiconductor is now quietly working at GloFlo?
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- FUN QUOTE
"After watching Joe Costello bid $2500 for lunch with Wally,
I realized what a steal my $200 seat was."
- Amit Gupta, CEO of Solido, on sitting at
Wally Rhines' table at the EDAC EDA Reunion.
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- Looks like Qualcomm is doing an Arteris asset buy; rumor is all the
Arteris European R&D got job offer letters from Qualcomm and on this
Monday the ones who have accepted are already on the job. Word is
in an internal meeting the Arteris CFO said it's a $224 M deal, which
seems high. It's expected they'll announce this within a week. If
this is true -- especially that $224 M number -- a BIG congrats goes
to Charlie Janac, CEO of Arteris! Wow!
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- In a massive cost cutting move, rumor is AMD has stopped business
with all EDA companies except for the Big 3, plus they've been
renegotiating with SNPS/CDNS/MENT for reduced deals -- that is, all
other EDA start-ups are being kicked out of AMD. One source said:
"This is one of those short-sighted CFO decisions where he
tells their chip designers to get their designs done with
whatever EDA tools they have left. This will bite them.
In spite of what Aart or Lip-Bu may say to close a deal at
the executive level, you can't get competitive timing- nor
power-closure without using some of these smaller tools."
What driving this is AMD's failed sales in the server market; what
still makes money for them are what the ATI graphics chips.
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- Remember all those mobile-related companies that Intel snapped up
like Infineon Wireless, Fujitsu Wireless, Xircom, Comneon, Omek,
ST-Ericsson GPS? Guess what? These companies all made TSMC-based
chips. Rumor is these acquired Intel divisions have been given an
internal edict to end-of-life all TSMC chips and to move all new
mobile chips in design over to Intel 14 nm! (Sorry, Hsinchu.)
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- I guessing Atrenta had a KILLER first half to 2013 (~$25 M maybe?)
because their employees are celebrating being paid a 30 percent
spiff on their half-year bonuses. I've heard, in half-year terms,
ATRT "breaks even" at around $15 M to $17 M -- which means it made
a rough $8 M to $10 M gross profit this half. Looking good.
And the kicker is Ajoy had no VP of Sales most of those 6 months.
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- FUN FACTS:
Gartner Semi CAPEX forecast
2012 2013 delta
Samsung $12.3 B $11.8 B - 4%
Intel $11.0 B $11.0 B 0%
TSMC $8.3 B $9.8 B +17%
GlobalFoundries $3.8 B $4.5 B +18%
SK Hynix $3.4 B $2.7 B -20%
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- Intel has announced it has started construction in Hillsboro, OR of
D1X Module 2, world's first 450 mm fab. Their 300 mm D1X Module 1
is planned to make 14 nm FinFETs by the end of this quarter.
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- The CTO of Real Intent, Pranav Ashar, is one of the two keynotes at
the upcoming Formal Methods in CAD (FMCAD'13) con in Portland, OR.
He'll talk about application-based verification. He has 70 papers
with 1,000 citations, wrote a book "Sequential Logic Synthesis", and
has 35 patents. The guy's FORMAL smart! :) Congrats Real Intent.
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- Mike Dini launched a new two-chip Altera Stratix V board, DNS5GX_F2,
for high-speed, low-cost, ASIC prototyping. Does 16.5 M ASIC gates
at 700 Mhz. "Two DDR3 SODIMMS provide massive on-board memory."
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- The former Editor-in-Chief of EEtimes.com, Brian Fuller, mysteriously
disappeared from EE Times and he has now reappeared at Cadence.com.
Evidently he's doing "Unhinged" humor videos on ChipEstimate.com.
"The Top 5 Alternative Social Media sites to invest in 2014"
5. In your FACE book
4. Google C++
3. Twitter rolling out its new Mafia site called
"Hey, I'm talkin to you!"
2. Wally's Hat Shop
And the #1 social media site to invest in 2014 in
1. Amish-interest
Special credit to tech blogger Pradeep Chakraborty for Wally's pic!
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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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