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Posted: March 30, 1998

Since Avant! Corp. (Fremont, Calif.) announced its Galax! system-on-a-chip design services group at last year's Design Automation Conference, little has been heard about the venture. But company officials now say that Galax! is under way as an independent company and in five months has quietly booked $22 million in libraries, cores and services. Galax! expects to announce its first core offerings next month.

Managed by marketing vice president Vic Kulkarni and chaired by president and chief executive officer Gerald Hsu, Galax! is beefing up its Passport Libraries, which Avant! obtained in acquiring Compass Design Automation last year.

The 100-person company's libraries support 0.5- and 0.35-micron processes for multiple foundries-including Chartered Semiconductor; IBM's Burlington, Vt., facility; LG Semicon; and TSMC. Kulkarni said the company is putting the finishing touches on its 0.25-micron libraries. It plans to release version 2.0 of its libraries, with complete silicon characterization, at the Design Automation Conference in June.

Kulkarni said Galax! uses these libraries as the foundation for creating a portfolio of cores. "We are now looking at building standards-based blocks and will very soon announce a suite of telecommunication cores," said Kulkarni.

Galax! hopes to help customers build higher-value application-specific cores. The next step is core relicensing to generate further revenue for both Galax! and its clients.

Besides libraries and cores, Galax! offers design services exclusive of its parent. "Galax! works with any company it wants to but most importantly system companies to make design flows work," said Kulkarni. Galax! has front- and back-end design services, test-bench creation, limited analog services and calibration for metal interconnects and model development.

Kulkarni said Galax! mainly uses Avant! tools as a starting point but, like independent services companies, will eventually use tools from other vendors. It hopes someday to license tools from Cadence, he said. Cadence and Avant! have long been embroiled in a legal battle over allegedly stolen code.

The Intellectual Property division of Mentor Graphics Corp. has created an IP Factory in Sophia Antipolis, France, to prepare and support IP cores from external sources for licensing. The facility is part of a new view of Mentor's core sourcing, creation and supply business model presented at the IP98 conference under the term M.IP Engine.

Mentor has hired Pierre Bricaud, formerly with Compass Design Automation, to create the first unit. The factory will take soft IP-usually from external suppliers-and "productize" it for easy use by Mentor's customers. Functions might include checking and generating documentation, translating a design from one hardware description language into another, and generating test chips to prove out the design.

Previously, Mentor expected its IP-creation engineers to do those things. Now, Bricaud said, the IP Factory will be responsible for them, and for signing off IP cores as suitable for Mentor's Inventra catalog. That, he said, will increase the emphasis on quality control and design discipline. "We will firm up IP so that it has an accuracy and a predictability," said Bricaud.