Synopsys Expands DesignWare IP Portfolio with Acquisition of Kilopass Technology

[Daniel Nenni]

Synopsys now has a corner of the NVM / OTP market after acquiring Sidense and Kilopass. eMemory is still a force to be dealt with but wow.... Expect this to be another year of acquisitions by Synopsys, Mentor, and Cadence... absolutely.

Acquisition Enables Synopsys to Provide a Broad Non-Volatile Memory IP Offering Optimized to Meet Performance, Power, and Area Targets for a Wide Range of Applications

Highlights

• Kilopass Technology's one-time programmable (OTP) non-volatile memory (NVM) IP has been integrated by more than 170 customers into more than 400 SoC designs, and shipped in more than 10 billion units worldwide
• Kilopass Technology's OTP NVM IP is available and silicon-proven in a broad range of standard logic CMOS processes including 10-nm and 7-nm
• Acquisition complements Synopsys' NVM portfolio with OTP products that are optimized for fuse replacement, secure key storage, device ID, analog trim, and code storage
• Synopsys' combined OTP and multi-time programmable (MTP) NVM IP solutions provide designers with a broad portfolio optimized for performance, power, and area for a wide range of automotive, IoT, industrial, and mobile applications

Synopsys Expands DesignWare IP Portfolio with Acquisition of Kilopass Technology

[count]

SNPS one of my favorite semi companies. In the fabless business model, the IP ownership is where most of the value is.

[Eric Esteve]

An excellent acquisition from Synopsys! It will add estimated $60-70 million IP revenue this year. eNVM IP is also a product with royalty based business model and this will equilibrate Synopsys's IP revenue, increasing royalty share.
As Dan has pointed, this acquisition will also offer to Synopsys a dominant position in eNVM IP category... and they like it!

As a reminder, Synopsys already enjoys > 50% market share in USB, PCIe, DDRn, SATA, HDMI, SRAM IP (in some case like USB this market share is around 80%).

Synopsys is clear #2 in this design IP business (but ARM/Softbank is #1 with almost 50% market share of total IP segment). Should we expect more consolidation in 2018? Certainly yes!