IN THE NEWS

Business and technology news from the semiconductor and design tool industries.

Gummel receives EDAC's Kaufman Award

The Electronic Design Automation Companies (EDAC) presented the first annual Phil Kaufman award to Dr. Hermann K. Gummel of Bell Labs. The award recognizes Gummel's contributions in electronic design automation over his three decades plus in the field. It was made on November 9 at the executive forum held at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, California.

Hermann Gummel (left) receives EDAC's Phil Kaufman Award from UC Berkeley's Richard Newton.

"EDAC's Phil Kaufman Award honors those who have driven widespread use of new techniques in design automation," said Dr. Walden C. Rhines, president and CEO of Mentor Graphics (Wilsonville, OR) and EDAC's vice-chair. "Hermann Gummel is one of those drivers. This award honors his role as a catalyst in the development of tools for semiconductor device analysis and modeling, layout, design-rule checking, circuit extraction, logic simulation, circuit simulation, and interconnect analysis."

Gummel, who joined Bell Labs in 1957, worked on numerical stimulation of bipolar transistors and co-authored (with H.C. Poon) the integral charge control model for bipolar transistors. Since then he has done so much that, in the words of Richard Newton, a member of the nominating committee, "Many of today's researchers would be surprised by the number of tools and techniques that can be traced back to Hermann Gummel and his team."

EDAC's award is named in honor of EDA industry pioneer Phil Kaufman, who died in 1992 while on a business trip in Japan. He was instrumental in advancing the concept of silicon compilation.

The award is intended to be given to individuals responsible for driving technological advances in EDA that have measurable impact on productivity in IC or system design.

Escalade steps up

A new player, Escalade (Sunnyvale, CA), has joined the EDA scene. The firm's primary focus will be the high-level design automation (HLDA) market. Escalade feels that more productive design methods and tools will be needed to meet the needs of future advanced electronics design, and that HLDA shows the most promise.

"Our goal," says Larry Lai, Ph.D., Escalade's president and co-founder, "is to remove the barriers for achieving the productivity gains possible, but not usually realized, with HLDA."

One of those barriers to widespread HLDA acceptance (estimates are that less than 20 percent of potential users worldwide use HLDA) is the complexity of hardware description languages (HDLs). According to Mark Miller, Escalade's vice president of marketing, the company aims to create tools that will "interface with all leading simulation and synthesis tools to achieve higher design productivity with less risk of tool incompatibilities."

Escalade was founded in 1993 by Lai and Min-Yu Hsueh, Ph.D. Hsueh, formerly vice president of Cadence Labs at Cadence Design Systems (San Jose, CA), is Escalade's chairman of the board and CEO.

They plan to begin shipping products in the first part of 1995.

Escalade is located at 1210 E. Arques Ave., Sunnyvale, CA (408) 481-1300.

NewsBytes

IKOS Systems Inc. (Cupertino, CA) has appointed Seodu Logic (Seoul, South Korea) to be their sales agent in South Korea.

A cooperative technology agreement between Aspec Technology Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA) and Intergraph Electronics (Huntsville, Ala.) will mean a combination and mutual support of Aspec's high density array technology and Intergraph's VeriBest ASIC design tool suite.

Wellspring Solutions Inc. (Sutton, MA) is cooperating with Kluwer Academic Publishers (Norwell, MA), to have the DOS version of their VeriWell simulator packaged in The Verilog Hardware Description Language, Second Edition . The book was written by Donald E. Thomas of Carnegie-Mellon University and Philip R. Moorby, creator of the Verilog language.

Actel Corp . (Sunnyvale, CA) and Loral Federal Systems-Manassas (a division of Loral Corp., New York City, NY) have announced an agreement in principle to jointly develop radiation-hardened, non-volatile FPGAs.

Actel Corp. and Exemplar Logic Inc. (Berkeley, CA) demonstrated in a real-world design that designers using synthesis optimized for Actel FPGAs can achieve high-performance without sacrificing performance. After evaluating the design of a GUI accelerator board using Actel's proposed PREP Working Group 4 benchmark methodology.

Xilinx Inc. (San Jose, CA) is shipping new FPGAs that are 100 percent PCI-compliant.

Cadence Design Systems Inc. (San Jose, CA) announced a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract to enhance, integrate, and deliver EDA software for the Advanced Research Projects Agency's High-Speed Circuit Design Program.

UniCAD Inc. (Westford, MA) has selected CAD Resources Inc. (San Jose, CA) to become a value-added reseller of the UniCAD engineering and design tools.

PADS Software Inc. (Marlborough, MA) has entered into an agreement with Viewlogic Systems Inc. (Marlborough, MA) to distribute Viewlogic's PRO Series computer aided engineering solutions, Workview PLUS, and Powerview schematic entry tools.

Viewlogic has signed an OEM agreement with Harris EDA Inc. (Fishers, NY) to license, resell, and support Harris' EDAnavigator software for board and module synthesis.

Movers and Shakers

Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc. (TAEC, Irvine, CA) has promoted Bob Brown to executive vice president and group executive of the Semiconductor Group. Brown had been senior vice president of the Semiconductor Group.

Allen Sha is the new director of technical sales for the Asian market at Exemplar Logic Inc. (Berkeley, CA).

Charles F. Swart and Steven Greenberg have been hired by Analogy Inc. (Beaverton, OR) as part of the Analogy Simulation Technology Team.

MicroModule Systems Inc. (Cupertino, CA) has appointed John F. Novitsky their CPU products business segment director; Robert R. Yamashita their business segment director for communications and PCMCIA products; and Howard D. Green to director of corporate communications. *

To voice an opinion on this or any Integrated System Design article, please e-mail your message to michael@asic.com.