SpringSoft

Another week in EDA and yet another acquisition by Synopsys as they buy SpringSoft this time for $406 million in cash. Paul McLellan wrote a good blog on this merger too.

Last week I blogged about the product overlap and integration challenges that Synopsys faces with the acquisition of Ciranova.



Let's take a look at the IC entry and layout products from SpringSoft and how they fit into the tools that Synopsys already owns:
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Josefina Hobbs, a solutions architect at Synopsys, shows the integration of Synopsys Protocol Analyzer with SpringSoft's Verdi using the Verdi Interoperability Apps (VIA) which gives open access to the Verdi KDB and FSDB databases. She also demonstrates protocol debug made easy using the Protocol Analyzer. This gives users a graphical view of the transfers, transaction, packets and handshaking of a protocol. ...

Over the years many attempts have been made to increase the level of automation in analog design. Most of these have not been especially successful. Probably part of the reason was inadequate technology but also there is an attitude that "real" analog designers design polygons on the bare silicon. I think two things have changed. Firstly, the technology for analog design, balancing ...

Taiwan's most famous EDA company is SpringSoft so on Wednesday at DAC I met wtih Dave Reed, Director of Marketing to get an update on what's new with their IC layout tools. ...

Little known fact, SpringSoft, Inc. is the largest supplier of EDA software in Asia with headquarters in both Hsinchu, Taiwan, and in Silicon Valley, CA. You will be hard pressed to find a company that does not use SpringSoft products and being located right down the street from the top two foundries doesn’t hurt either.
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TSMC's technnology symposium seems to be the new time to make product announcements, with ARM and Atrenta yesterday and Springsoft today.

There is a new incarnation of Springsoft's Laker layout family, Laker³ (pronounced three, not cubed). The original version ran on its own proprietary database. The second version added openAccess to the mix, but with ...

As I have been watching the developments in EDA and Semiconductor industry, it is apparent that we remain fragmented unless pushed to adopt a common standard mostly due to business reasons. Foundries are dictating on the rules to be followed by designs, thereby EDA tools incorporating them. Also, design companies needed to work with tools from different vendors. As a result various exchange ...

The first version of the debug platform Verdi (then called Debussy) dates back to 1996 over 15 years ago. The second version was released in 2002. And now SpringSoft is releasing the 3rd version Verdi³ which is a completely new generation. A tool environment like Verdi seems to need to be completely refreshed about every 5 or 6 years to take account of the changes in the scale of design and the issues ...

Mark Milligan recently joined SpringSoft as VP Corporate Marketing. I sat down with him on Monday to get his perspective on things.

He started life, as so many of us, as an engineer. He was an ASIC designer working on low-level ...